"For two months, I had no information whatsoever about the whereabouts of my parents. They had simply disappeared. Then, a letter finally came. I recognized my mother's hand writing. She wrote that my father suffered from pneumonia and that they were in the Lodz ghetto. I was allowed to send them money. But in order to send it, I had to go all the way from Doubravka to Lochotín to a post office for Jews. After the war my brother told me that although I was sending them quite a lot of money, in the ghetto, it was barely enough for a loaf of bread. Later, I would give the money to a friend of mine who was sending it through a Jewish woman that lived in a mixed marriage. It was very complicated. Eventually, I would only get a confirmation of the receipt of the money from my parents – it had their signature on it, but no more letters."
"When we came to Auschwitz, we were instructed to leave everything behind. They told us we'd get everything we needed at the dormitory. We weren't allowed to take our belongings with us. The women went in line on the left-hand side, the men on the right-hand side. There was a tiny soldier who showed us where to go. Then, there was this nurse who served in the doctor's office of my husband. She told me she had seen my husband talking to that man. He didn't speak any German, he originated in Třeboň. He showed that man his elbow injury – a reminder of his football career in his youth. It didn't prevent him to work in any way. He might have passed if he had only told him he was a doctor. But instead, he kept explaining him something and showing him his elbow. I asked that Polish girl what it meant that my husband was sent the other way. She said: 'your husband is smoking out of that chimney over there, you can breathe him'. That was his end. You could say that he sentenced himself to death. But he didn't know it. He was thirty-seven or thirty-eight years old."
"In the morning, I came to the court and found it littered with the furniture and other things from the pharmacy. 'What has happened here'? I thought to myself. Among the things, I found my coat, my beautiful leather coat that I would later wear to Auschwitz. I learned from one man that the Germans threw it all out from the second floor. They were like mad man. They issued the order in the night and it all had to be cleared during one day. They planned to establish an archive in the building and that's why they needed to clear the rooms. So they threw all the furniture – the beds, the closets, the tables, chairs, simply everything, out of the window from the second floor. They said it's going to become the new archive but they didn't establish the archive there for the next year. It remained empty and desolate for the next year."
"An SS-man was walking between the beds. There were ten women on each bunk bed. I was on the upper bed. Suddenly, an elderly woman from Vienna covered me with her body and effectively hid me underneath her. She told me to cover my face and to hide myself under her because he was looking for good-looking young girls and women. He selected about ten girls and took them away. No one ever saw them again. Later, we found out that they drained their blood for the German soldiers. They bled them to death. In this way she saved me from certain death this old Viennese woman. She said she was sure they wouldn't pick her because they're only going after the young and beautiful ones."
"At noon, we would wait in the breadline for some soup. In the evening, they would give us a couple of potatoes and a piece of bread. Once a week, we would get a tiny bit of margarine. Occasionally, there was some German Blutwurst. Just a little bit for the whole week. There was no meat at all. There was something swimming in the soup. People would stand there. Very hungry people. In particular the old ones – they were most hungry because they didn't get as much as we did. Our rations were much bigger because we were the workforce – we were working, but they didn't. But still, it was survivable in Theresienstadt because you had quite a lot of bread in the morning and evening and some warm soup in the afternoon. There was also some black coffee. You could survive on the diet in Theresienstadt."
"About six kilometers behind Budějovice, the train came to a halt. It was slowing down and then it stopped. It couldn't go on because the stop lights were on red. Suddenly, I said to myself: 'my old mother in law from Třeboň would jump out now so I have to do the same'. I climbed up the shoulders of Vilma Beck to the narrow window above her head. I told her to throw out my shoes after I'll climb out the window. I pulled myself out of the window and climbed down to the ground on a ladder that was located right next to it. She threw me my sandals. A friend of mine followed me on the ladder. Suddenly, the German guards shouted: 'Da ist jemand heraus gesprungen'! The opened fire, but luckily, it was dark and they didn't see us. We lay down and after a while the wheels of the train started turning. That was the happiest moment of my life. The train continued to Mauthausen where a lot of the girls would die."
"In advance of the visit of the International Red Cross inspection at Theresienstadt, the whole city was carefully cleaned and polished. They tried to improve the appearance of the ghetto and to make it seem that the prisoners actually had a good life there. The pavements were brushed and cleaned, women were given swimsuits and sent to swim and the children were given herrings. They even mounted a carousel for the kids on the main square. It was truly a show for the Red Cross. I desperately wanted to go swimming but my husband told me to stay away from it – to not take part in that farce. So I went back to the pharmacy and stayed there while the other women were swimming in the Ohře River. Later, I had to acknowledge that he was right. It was reasonable not to get involved in that theater."
Marie Sandová, née Arnsteinová, was born in 1916 in Třebívlice near Lovosice. She was educated in Litoměřice and in Prague, where she earned her diploma in pharmacy before the outbreak of the war. Because of her Jewish origin, she was interned in the Theresienstadt ghetto and later transferred to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. In Theresienstadt, she was running a local pharmacy. She was later also placed in the Freiberg labor camp – the production site of the V2 missiles. Her first husband, doctor Jiří Švarc, was murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Her parents and her brother were taken to the Lodz ghetto as soon as 1941. Her parents perished there, her brother was lucky and managed to escape from the ghetto and make it to Slovakia, where he joined the 1st Czechoslovak army corps and came back to Prague with his unit. In April 1945, Marie escaped near České Budějovice from a cattle car that was transporting the camp inmates to Mauthausenu. She went into hiding in Třeboň for the remainder of the war. After the war, she lived in Prague where she married for a second time with Ludvík Sanda. They have a daughter named Luisa.
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