Adolf Řehoř

“My father died in a concentration camp. Another relative died in Auschwitz. My dad spent the first nine months in the Kounic Student Hall in Brno. Then he was deported to Gross-Rosen in Poland, and from there he was sent on a death march to Sangerhausen-Dora. When they got there, the prisoners were washed and left naked out in the frost for three hours, where they died one by one. That was in 1945, in February. We searched for my father through the Repatriation Office. We received a letter from one of his fellow prisoners from Ostrava, who remembered his number, that he had been deported there and died soon after. I have it all stored away, the letters and the reports. The last reports we received were from Gross-Rosen, two letters written in German. Dad couldn’t speak German, so someone must have written them for him, perhaps one of the other inmates. It wasn’t possible to write in Czech. He wrote to us from the Kounice Student Hall once a month (in Czech), and we were allowed to send him a parcel once a fortnight. Mum and his brother tried to visit him, but the Gestapo wouldn’t let them in at all, so they just stayed at the gate. We never saw my father again after he was arrested.”

“German was one of the obligatory classes right from the first year. We were taught by Czech teachers because we were in the Protectorate, not in the Sudetes. My wife was in the Sudetes. In Biskupice, which was the neighbouring village. Everything around this village was all the Sudetes. Zadní Arnoštov, Víska, Biskupice, Chornice, those were all part of the Sudetes, they belonged to Germany. And Jevíčko here, Jaroměřice, Velké Opatovice, that was the Protectorate. Jevíčko also had a German school, it had the Hitlerjugend and the German Kuratorium. I remember how they always told us: ‘When the Hitlerjugend march by you, you have to stand at attention and stay where you are and salute them.’ It was because we were scared, they were nasty, those boys from the Hitlerjugend. They owned the factory, Hotel Eden, and they had the German school. And they were raised to consider themselves something better than the other inhabitants. Those were children who mostly attended the German school, they had brown shirts, they swore at Czechs, yelled at them. I didn’t witness them beat anyone up. We usually just stood at attention. We had to use the salute at school mainly, when there was a celebration, say, of Hitler’s birthday or of the founding of the Protectorate on 15 March. We had to sing the German anthem and also Die Fahne Hoch. They taught us to do that.”