Miloš Volf

“I came to Flossenburg on February 7, 1944. It's Bavarian Siberia, the temperature regularly drops to minus thirty degrees Celsius. It's regularly minus twenty five, minus thirty. While we were standing on the Apelplatz, we had to get undressed and stand naked in the cold. Some, especially the elderly, fell down and then they were taken away. Afterwards we went to the washroom where they poured hot and cold water over us. I had a 'return undesirable' (RU – Rükkehr Unerwünscht) in my papers, so I was sent to the stone pit. We were very poorly dressed; we had underwear and a pair of trousers, a shirt and a jacket. We were not allowed to wear gloves. Everybody had to grab a stone and carry it upstairs to the top of the pit. It was a very tall staircase along the edge of the pit where one could easily fall down and break ones neck. The guards would regularly beat us and when they weren't satisfied with the load we were carrying, they loaded us with a stone heavier than we could possibly carry. If they really hated somebody, they would order him to lay down and put a huge stone on his back. There was no way the unfortunate could possibly carry such a big stone. Then they would say: 'You see, he's such a bastard that he prefers to die than to carry this stone'. They would also pour water on the stairs which turned into ice. People would then slip and fall down the stairs. I saw so many broken legs and arms, stones flying in the air, it was just horrific. When somebody managed to carry the stone upstairs, he had to throw it down into the pit again so that someone else could carry it up the next day again.”

“We came out of a forest in a place where the Russian army was encamped. A Russian officer came running in our direction. He was completely drunk and was wielding his machine gun in his hands. He shouted that we were Germans and that he would shoot us. We tried to persuade him that we weren't German and spoke Russian to him. I thought that this was it, that I was going to die so close to home after I had survived hell. But luckily, a captain with a couple of soldiers came in the last moment and saved us. He tore away the drunken officer's epaulets and took away his machine gun. Then they beat him up badly. That captain then came to me and rolled a couple of cigarettes, which we smoked. After we had smoked for a while we helped him pull out a German ambulance from a ditch. He started the engine and offered us a ride. After we drove for about a kilometer, the engine stopped because it ran out of petrol. The captain said: 'what can we do? Let's smoke a cigarette'. And then we walked.”

“I was cleaning up the house one afternoon when the supervisor (his name was Soukup, note by the editor) came for me. He gave me about twelve carpets to clean. They ranged from the very small ones to the big ones. They lived in the one-story building around the corner. When I finished the work I wanted to bring the carpets upstairs – he lived on the first floor. But instead he gave me a basket and we went to the garden in the inner yard where I picked up dandelions and milt while he went to see his rabbits and geese. Then, I picked up the carpets and carried them upstairs to his apartment. His daughter was there – she was a weepy schoolgirl. When I said that I was leaving he stopped me and showed me two very miserable drawings. He asked me if I could draw something like that. I said yes. There were three drawings, which I instantly completed. In a week, he came to me again. This time I only cleaned one tiny carpet but did 12 drawings. By the end of June the school results of his daughter had gone up dramatically. She improved in drawing from a four to a two. He gave me a slice of bread but told me to eat it at his apartment. I cut it into two halves and stashed one of them in my pocket. He saw me and asked me whom I would give it to. I told him that I wanted to give it to my dad who was also in the camp. I also told him that he would like to be in his unit. He agreed and said that my dad should show up in the morning. Then he asked about my mother and I told him that she was also in the camp. On Monday, he sent me to the women’s yard to see her. So he wasn’t a bad man even though he often boasted that he once killed an inmate with a single blow. He was rather primitive, and you know, I learned that with people like this you have to make quick decisions.”

“They put all the Germans with the green triangles in SS uniforms and bolstered the security of the camp with them. So that's how they made them disappear from the block. We had to tear off the numbers from our clothes which were put on a pile and burned. The card files of the blocks were burned as well, with those who were hanged or executed in the camp, in order to destroy all evidence. Then they handed the camp over to the mayor. We were no longer given a quarter of a kilo of bread but hardly an eighth of a kilo. All of a sudden, the Americans changed their direction for tactical reasons and came back, calling everyone together. I wasn't on the block by then because the block man was already gone and the typist was sick. I had to do everything myself afterwards. There were over a thousand inmates on that block. So they assembled them in the courtyard and told them that there were three trucks in front of the first building which was the house of the commander. They said the trucks were sent by the International Red Cross and that they would hand us over to them if we produced new card files. They issued us new numbers, this time they were on a red background, not white as they had been before. The triangles and the letters marking our nationality had disappeared. We were supposed to write it down, to assign the new number, old number, what camp we came from; name, surname, nationality, occupation, what unit we worked in, if we were treated in the camp, etc. Well, it worked fairly well with the Czechs, Poles, Russians, Germans and even with the French. It was much harder with the Italians. I thought that my Latin would help but it didn't, I had to use French. The toughest job was with the Hungarians. We communicated in sign language. I didn't sleep for two days and nights to get the job done. I thought that as soon as I was done with the assignment, I would be free. On the 20th, I brought the new card files to the main administration and they told me: 'lad, it's a scam. The first transport has already left.'”

“The camp was overcrowded, it was designed for 3500 people, but there were over 16,000 inmates placed here. We couldn’t even sleep, only the Germans were allowed to sleep. The other inmates could only sit on the bunk beds. In fact, there were so many of us there that they couldn’t even squeeze us into our rooms so they would simply lock up a number of inmates in the showers. Those who died overnight fell on the floor and were removed the next day in the morning. The living conditions were really appalling. The camp was infested with lice, everything was teeming with them. Typhoid fever was mowing down inmates by the dozens. The incinerator wasn’t able to keep pace with the high rate of deaths and therefore they would simply put the dead on piles, pour a flammable liquid over them and burn them. I still remember that huge pile of burning bodies, a pile of human ashes. The overall mood among the inmates in the camp was very desperate and people were down. Miloš Kučera told me that the SS-men in the electrical workshop, where they maintained the power supply for the camp, were also having their radio receivers repaired. He went to the workshop to get fresh news from the broadcast. We would get together with the typist in the evening and he would tell us the news, which we would spread around the camp. The news increased people’s spirits quite a bit. They were not as depressed if they knew what was going on outside the camp. The Germans noticed this and on Christmas Eve they gathered the inmates and hanged six Russians. Officially, the reason was attempted escape but in reality, they wanted to scare us. In the background, a Christmas tree was set on fire. The Russians who were hanged were first beaten. Each got fifty blows with a stock whip, and these were severe blows. When they fainted, they were poured over with cold water and then the beating continued. It was a terrible show and I felt really down afterwards. I resorted to drawing pictures like ‘wooden shoes versus top boots’ and ‘castle and hunger’.”