“We went downstairs where our dining hall was. We had to keep our hands up and we stood there for about an hour till they gathered all of us there. I believe even the director of the dorm and some other dorm employees were there. They told them to get out and then they made us go back to our rooms to dress. We dressed. It was cold, and I had a winter coat. We wore hats back in those days. Who would have been wearing a hat today, right? They pushed us into trucks and drove us to Ruzyně.”
“It went like this for years. During all that time we haven’t got any vegetables or even a half-rotten apple that fell from a tree. Today, I always look at it when I see fallen apples scattered under a tree, and I think: ´What we would have given if only we had been able to eat an apple like that.´ What happened when we were working on the construction of that port (Jaroslav Franc speaks about it in another part of the recording - auth.´s note) was that we were digging in mud, and some guys found something which looked like horseradish. They pulled it out and ate it. There were six of them and all of them were dead by the evening.”
“Nobody knew anything. Then we arrived to Dresden and some women from the Red Cross gave us a cup of tea there. This was the only thing we had during that and the following day. It was morning when we were in Dresden. We reached Sachsenhausen in the evening of the eighteenth, I don’t know what time it was, I only remember it was raining and they were rushing us on a terribly muddy road to the camp.”
“I was born on September 10, 1919. My date of birth is formed just by ones and nines. I was born in this street, but on the other side. My dad was partly handicapped from the First World War. He was a baker by profession, but since he became partly handicapped, he was given a job at the post office. At first he operated a telegraph, then he worked as a postman. He was actually working at the post office all his life. My mom was a trained manual worker, there is no position like that today, she was sewing the top parts of shoes. She was earning some extra money by it, she was doing this work at home.”
“Once they brought some ten thousand – or twenty thousand, as some claim – Russian prisoners there. Usually they executed them by Rückenschießen, a shot through the back of the neck. And they placed them all into one barrack so that they were standing, they couldn’t even sit down, and they didn’t give them any food. And they brought Sergei Machonin there, because his father was a Russian and his mother a Czech, so he knew Russian, and they brought him there to interpret. He came back totally scared, telling us that some of the Russians who survived, were eating the liver of those who had died standing among them.”
When I was twenty, I envied the SS men’s dogs their grub; when I was fifty, I could eat whatever I wanted at a banquet with the U.S. President in the White House. This is how life changes
Ing. Jaroslav Franc, Csc., was born September 10, 1919 in Pardubice. After secondary school he went to study chemistry at the university in Prague. Following his participation in the funeral procession for Jan Opletal, Jaroslav Franc was arrested early in the morning on November 17, 1939 in the Masaryk Dormitory and together with other students he was taken to Ruzyně, where their identities were established. Had he been less than twenty, he would have been released, but at that time he was twenty and two months. By train he was transported to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. In this north German camp he was working on the construction of a port and an ancillary concentration camp or in the production of material for the intended capital of Germania. On Hitler‘s birthday, on April 20, 1942, he was released and he began working in a dairy in Pardubice. After the war he completed the university and till his retirement he was working as a researcher in the Research Institute of Organic Syntheses in Pardubice. Jaroslav Franc passed away on May, the 17th, 2016
