Gabriela Binková

“I received an order that we were to go to Germany. We came to the railway station and they were calling out names and telling us which carriage we were to board. There were many of us on the platform, not just a few people. There were a lot of us. People from each company were calling out names of those who were to go to work for them. When he called our names, he said: ‘You need to wait in the carriage number this and that.’ He called out about twenty-six or twenty-eight of us girls and eight boys. We were going to work in the same factory. We were about nineteen years old. What do you want to do when you are nineteen? Well, I was already twenty, because my birthday is in January, and we went in March. We thus went there. We stayed in a hotel there, not like people in other places who lived in labour camps. Like Mrs. Jeřábková, or Božka Hochmanová, for example, who went to a labour camp, because they were sent to Linz or some other large cities while we went to a tiny town.”

“Máňa received a telegram to go home, because her dad was in hospital and he was very sick. But they didn’t allow her to go. Two weeks later she received another telegram. We were getting one day off in order to have time to wash our clothes. I was not at work that day, I was doing the washing. The girls from the kitchen called me that there was a telegram for Máňa, and they gave it to me. I gave it to the woman, and she immediately called to the factory and asked them to let Máňa go home immediately, because her father’s condition was serious. They let her go home and she left. She arrived home and her dad was already dead. She went straight to the hospital and her dad was already dead, and she was thus not able to speak to him anymore. She got upset, and therefore she didn’t go back to Germany. Since she has not returned there within a week, they imprisoned her. SS men imprisoned her and she spent two months in prison.”