Antonín Otta

“Well, for instance, I didn’t see this, but I heard about it. The guards could do whatever [they liked], or if it was a political supervisor, those were even more confident. Say, he’d stand a priest - who otherwise preached at church - on the compost heap. ‘You’ll stand there until you say: “Virgin Mary was a whore.” Well, that priest won’t say it. So [the supervisor] helped him out now and then by smashing him up. Well, and he might have stood there for perhaps twenty hours. And then, just to rub it in, they wouldn’t give him anything to eat for two days.”

“There was an escape attempt there. From Vykmanov Camp. Of course, it flopped, it wasn’t good at all. They were waiting for them to climb through, they had floodlights trained on the spot where they would come out. Well, and then they started shooting without [warning]. The camp had roll call at two in the night, or one, to get us out into the air a bit. Well, and there were three that they’d killed, they carried them about outside the camp. ‘This is what happens when you try to escape.’ Well, that wasn’t good.”