Otto Taussig

“And in Toužim we walked in the night, and I was cold because I only had a shirt and clogs. And the food, we begged for it three or four times at some lonely houses, when we saw that the house stood all alone. We watched for a long time to see if there was a bloke in the house, or only a woman. And when there was only a woman, we went to beg. They gave us bread, potatoes, so we ate something at least, but not much. And when we were in Toužim, we slept in one hayloft. It was part of a house, it served as a barn, and there was hay in that part. In the morning we heard three or four blokes saying that Hitler had copped it. So we climbed out, but the blokes told us that it’s not over yet, that we should better hide back inside the hayloft, that someone would come to get us in the night. And really, a bloke came for us in the night and took us to Pilsen.”

“Another terrible experience, which I can still see happening before my eyes today. There was a camp of female Poles next to us, and behind their camp there was something like a hill, except those were ammunition depots. During one of the air raids those girls ran out on to the meadow and they got the first hits. And me and the friends that I served with, we then had to load up the heads, arms, and take them to the local morgue.”

“All I remember is that [the SA members] went wild there. They broke all of our windows, and we couldn’t even close the front door when they left, and they arrested my father and took him to Sachsenhausen.”