Stanislava Šprincová

“There were mainly Italian prisoners of war, the Badoglio supporters. They were suffering from hunger. When we could, we were secretly giving them food. There were no Russians in the camp, because they were probably held separately in even worse conditions. Then there was a group of English and Scottish POWs. They were allowed to move freely on the premises of the construction company which worked on the yard and in those factory halls. When they learnt that I could speak French quite well and also a little bit of English, one of the Scottish prisoners sent me a very interesting letter and I replied to him. Guys who worked as electricians there were in contact with the prisoners and they served as messengers. But I was naive enough to take one of these letters to Olomouc to show it to my parents. When I went back, I forgot that letter at home. The Gestapo came to arrest my father and they found the letter in the drawer. It was unfortunate coincidence. They found two letters, and they arrested me for that: ´Where have you met that prisoner of war?´ I kept telling them: ´I didn’t even know him.´ I tried to make it look trivial. But it didn’t help me. Above all, I tried to cover the electrician guys who had been carrying the letters for me.”

“I was taken at night. The prison cell was crowded and people had to step over each other. A baby was crying, and the stench was horrible. I didn’t get any sleep in this transport cell. Then they made us stand on the ramp and began calling out our names. At first I didn’t realize it when they called Kófan Stanislaus. That was actually Kavan Stanislava. Only when they repeated it two or three times did I raise my hand. There were more of us and we had to get into a prison van and they were driving us all over Vienna and taking us to the individual prisons. Vienna had been bombed before and the van was bouncing on the cobbled streets. I haven’t eaten any breakfast and I felt sick. I nearly fainted. I was the last one. They took me to the third district, to the Jugendhaftanstalt in Rüdengasse. That was a special prison for juveniles. They led me to a cell and I asked the woman who was the director of the prison: ´Please, give me something to eat.´ - ´There is nothing left.´ I haven’t eaten anything for the whole day. I was half dead. At first I was placed in a cell for foreign inmates and after some of them had been released, they merged them into one. As the bombardment was getting more intense, there were no new inmates coming and they merged the both cells, the German one and the foreign one, into one.”

“We received a telegram, which took five days to arrive, that Antonín Kavan was bedridden in the quarantine station in Roudnice nad Labem suffering from typhoid fever. There were no regular trains operating at that time. The railway tracks, bridges, and trains had been damaged. The Railways’ headquarters dispatched a bus from here to Terezín and my mother and I used the opportunity and travelled to Roudnice nad Labem. There we went the International Red Cross and we learnt from them that Antonín Kavan had died that night due to typhoid fever. That was a terrible blow.”

“I heard a cry: ´The synagogue is on fire!´ I went there to take a look. Awful smoke was coming out of it and there were guards around. What was interesting was that it was the Czech fascists who were watching it and preventing the firefighters from putting down the fire. I even saw one boy there who attended the Slavic grammar school and who had even been a Boy Scout before. The synagogue thus kept burning, because they have not allowed them to put the fire down.”

“It was very difficult for me to endure that stupid political regime. Can you imagine what stupid things we had to put up with at the university? Or take the elections under the totalitarian system: here is the ballot box, here is the only unified ballot paper and you just put it in there. There was no secret ballot or free decision-making… As teachers we had to tell the students that the socialist elections were a wonderful benefit. Or we had to make them march in the May Day parades. It goes without saying that they justly objected against it. But we had to report that our students did participate in the parade. What I did was that I turned to my academic assistants who were students working for us and ordered them: ´Listen now, you go and join that parade. I got to report the people who will go that and I want to report that my students have participated.´ My assistants went there just for my sake. We had to come to the assembly place. ´Here, take the flowers and banners and you got to wave as you pass by the stands and shout hooray.´ The professors and academics from the university were there.”