John Freund

“We were scared. He asked me: ‘How old are you?’ I told him: ‘Fourteen years and one month,’ because it was a month after my birthday. We were scared when we knew that it was either death or life. I was almost trembling. But you could not show that you were afraid, that would not help you at all.”

“Fred Hirsch was a great personality, and Olympian personality, I would say. He came from Germany and he was a brave and beautiful person. He was actually a leader of the youth in Auschwitz as well. And then he committed suicide rather than to go to the gas chamber. He would have gone to the gas chamber together with the children and he would not have been able to watch the children suffer, and so he rather committed suicide.”

“Americans then let us get into a truck and they drove us away. We passed through Nuremberg. I felt great joy, for the city was totally destroyed and nothing has been left standing there. It was the only joy I had. They have deserved this. Then we arrived to the Czech border and people gave us a welcome there. It was the beginning of May, the radio played loudly, and the President Beneš then arrived there.”

“We, the Jewish children, were publishing a magazine in Budějovice. It’s been turned into a book now. The magazine was called Klepy (‘Rumours’), it had beautiful illustrations, and there were short-stories written by us, the children. Many photographs and drawings. If you are interested in it, a book called The Underground Reporters has been published about it, but it has not yet been translated to Czech.”

“One of us lived in Holland and he remembered the selection of those ninety boys. He was searching whether some of them have survived. Later he was psychically ill, he was one of the people who were not able to bear it. He already died. He began with the search, and I and the others received a letter from him. I then followed up the creation of the book instead of him. In this way we found almost everybody; about half of them – forty-five – have survived it. Some of them were here, some in America, some in Israel. We thus began exchanging letters, and the book came into being as a result. And we also had a reunion here in Prague.”