"My grandfather then went to Auschwitz. There is a very interesting story about how they arrived at Auschwitz and, as you know, Dr. Mengele was on that ramp. Plus other guards. And they were separating the people there. When my grandfather was in the railway carriage earlier, somebody told him that it was necessary to make up things and claim during the selection that one was a worker, a carpenter. They let these people live and they were doing these jobs. My grandfather said he didn't know how he came up with the idea, but at the moment when Mengele was there, because he [grandfather] could speak German well, he told [the truth] that he was a commercial engineer, that he could run administration well. And Mengele nodded that he was to go to the side of the survivors. Whereas those who were inventing [working-class] occupations that day all went to the other side."
"I wasn´t admitted right to school either. I did the admissions interviews, there were such subjects as general knowledge back then. That's what it was called. I was asked by the committee about the years 1948 and 1968. And I, as I had been properly taught by my grandparents, although it was not tactical, said before the committee that it had been the biggest mistake in the history of Czechoslovakia. When I saw my results afterwards, I had a 1.0 average result in special subjects, but it said that I was politically ineleigible. So they didn't admit me to the medical faculty."
Martin Polák was born on 27 March 1960 into a family with Jewish roots. His grandparents Lev and Ida Gans, as well as his mother Věra Gansová Poláková, were deported to the Terezín ghetto at the end of 1941. Ida and Věra survived the entire war there, while Lev Gans was transported to Auschwitz. He eventually escaped from a death march and made his way to Prague under dramatic circumstances. After 1948, witness´s grandparents faced having the label of a „bourgeois“ family and worked in menial jobs. Mother Věra was expelled from the Faculty of Science and worked at the Žižkov Freight Station. It was only in the 1970s that she was able to graduate from the University of Science and Technology. Despite his excellent results in the entrance exams, Martin Polák was not admitted to medical studies on the first attempt and spent a year in the so-called zero year. He graduated from medical faculty in 1985 and got a job at the hospital in Příbram, where he worked for more than thirty years. In the 1990s, he was involved in the activities of the medical unions trying to raise doctors‘ salaries. He became a member of the Jewish organization B‘nai B‘rith. Since 2019, he has been the head of the internal medicine department at the hospital in Mladá Boleslav.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
