František Šulák

“My worst experience comes from the Dachau camp when the Americans liberated us, for the prisoners were then squaring accounts with one another. To put it simply, each prisoner knew how every person was, who had been peaching upon on the others, who had been cruel to them. And none of those informers survived. They were simply beaten to death.”- “Did you witness something like that personally?”- “I did. They beat them to death, all his (the informer’s) bones were broken. He was begging for mercy, but it did not help him, and among the French and the Poles it was the worst.”- “The French also did it like those Poles?” -“There were French, Poles, Dutch, Italians, Germans, the majority was Polish, some Russians were also there. About 42 nationalities were imprisoned there, so it is difficult to judge. But the Poles were the worst friends. They would do anything for their own survival.”

“In December the front approached Brno, so we were evacuated, loaded onto a train, there were about 850 of us and we rode to Flossenbürg for three days. Three days without water and food, squeezed in cattle trucks, inside the wagon there was only straw. The train had three wagons, I think, and it took three days to get to Flossenbürg. There was a direct route to Flossenbürg, it does not exist anymore. We had to get off and run toward Flossenbürg – they made us run up a hill, just like cattle. We came to the main gate, and there were three people hanging from gallows. Every time somebody made some offence, they would hang him there immediately as a warning to others. We came in, had to go to a washing room, undress, and we were deloused, shaved, washed, and our hair was cut. The guards had rubber hoses and they beat us with them, then turned the water on – alternately ice cold and very hot water, and then they made us run out in the snow. They threw a bundle of clothing in front of each of us and we had to put it on out there in this snow. Then we were put to quarantine, which consisted of four barracks. And we spent a month there, but not everyone survived it, people were dying there, especially the elderly…Out of 850 of us about 400 remained, the rest was sent to the crematorium.”

“I worked in the main building, where the Gestapo, their boss, had their office. And we worked there in the attic and sorted clothes left behind the Jews, we sorted it by size and it was then being sent to the front for the army. It was in April and I had only a plain light shirt and light trousers, wooden clogs, and no hat. So I found a warm shirt for myself, I put it on under my light shirt, and suddenly a guard came in and the SS commander then found out that I had put on this shirt, and he said: ´Shoot him!´ But there was another SSman, a captain, probably the commander’s deputy, and he told him that he himself had allowed me to put on that shirt, and the blue cap I had also taken. But it was no use, for my punishment I was sent to work in a quarry. There was a penalty commando, which had to run up and down the quarry all the time. All the days, we would take the rocks from the bottom, carry them to the top, and from there we would have to thrown then down and this went on the whole day.”

“There were mostly all of us from the death march to Dachau, prisoners who had had no food. And their bodies were not able to cope with it when they suddenly began to eat. They got dysentery because of that, then typhoid as well, because we, who went through the death march, had been drinking water we found in ditches, with stale and what not, and thus we contracted typhoid. Those who have survived were lying there sick for about a week or two. The Americans washed us, deloused us, and provided medical treatment to us. Then, when we got somewhat better, they took us to Munich to SS barracks to recover, we stayed there for two weeks, then they washed and deloused us again, dressed us in SS military uniforms, only that they attached a Czechoslovak tricolour ribbon to the front, and they took us home, I mean to Pilsen to the train station. By this train I arrived to Ostrava-Přívoz, there we had to get off. And at that moment the Russians wanted to attack us, wanted to shoot us all because they thought we were Germans. But the railway guards who were with us stopped them. So the Russian commando, I don’t know who exactly it was, let us stand aside and then allowed us to go home, they only sent some guards to protect us, and so I walked all the way from Přívoz to Kunčičky. I weighted only 28 kilo. I came to our house, knocked on the door, my mother opened the door and when she saw a German soldier, she closed the door and would not talk to me at all, but then she recognized my voice and so she opened the door for me. She wanted me to eat dinner, but I said: ´I don’t want to eat anything.´ Because I was completely exhausted…. So I lay down, in a week I developed a serious case of pneumonia, my father brought me to the Fifejdy hospital and the doctor there tells him: ´You know, Mr. Šulák… Take him home, he will die on the way back anyway….´And when we left the hospital, I collapsed, I fainted and I did not have a clue what was happening next. I woke up only after ten or eleven days. My father called some folk healer, and she treated me with nettles. They would cut the nettles and mix it with sour milk, then spread the mixture onto a sheet and then wrap it around my body.”