Vlasta Forejtová

"The only thing I was present during the time I was still in school in 1944, before my mother took me away from school, was that there was a new school built in 1934 and they took the whole school. The Czech children were divided into the pubs and other free rooms and everything, and there was a Hitler Youth in the whole school. And I remember that when we were going to school or from school and the Hitler Youth was marching around the town, that we Czechs had to stand at attention and we had to pay tribute to those Hitler Youth, those bastards, basically, which were fanatical children and here they were really behaving like soldiers, or they were, they had to behave like soldiers and we had to pay tribute to them. That's what I remember, when we always had to stand at attention and we weren't allowed to move."

"We knew who he was, he normally lived here for a few more years after the war, so we used to meet him, everything, but I confess we never told anyone his name and we never mentioned him because it was a human failing at the time. And he also had one only daughter and then somehow around the 50's they moved away from here, so we knew, but I say, my mother and I took it as a human failure. We felt sorry for him because - just because he spoke, he got back from the concentration camp and my father didn't."

"My father's interrogations were so harsh that they always beat him in Klatovy and threw him on the concrete floor in the corridor. Well, you can imagine how it was during the winter on the concrete corridor, so my father got pneumonia, and with that pneumonia he was actually sick all the time until Terezín, where he was not interrogated afterwards, but his health was undermined and he survived until the 5th of July. He died at 9:30 AM on May 5, 1945, and at ten o'clock the gates of the fourth yard were opened, the Danish Red Cross came in, and the Danish Red Cross liberated the entire fourth yard, so that all the prisoners who were there were liberated. My father was already dead by nine thirty, we never found out where he is buried, we only have a death certificate, a death certificate that he died in Terezín. And anyway, even if he hadn't died, he had the XYZ mark, that means return unwanted, so he would have been shot."