Emília Gáboríková

“The girls were afraid of Russians, because they were real rakehells. Therefore, the girls used to hide from them. My father made a hole in a stack of straw, which was a shelter for twenty girls. However, one of the girls didn’t manage to escape. As a girl I went to see those girls every morning to help them. You know, the girl who hadn’t managed to run away was always badly bitten and really pitiful.”

“Her name was Herta! You know, there were such shacks for soldiers fenced with barbed wire. Soldiers were actually young boys; and Herta with the soldiers, with the young boys.... Well, as she needed to have an alibi because her father never wanted her to go anywhere, I had to go with her; I was ten at that time. She always went to see those soldiers in the shack and as I couldn’t go home, I spent that time downstairs among the convicts. I used to bring some bread, fruit, paper, notebooks, because there was no paper in Germany. When we went home, we always brought a lot of paper, a lot of notebooks which I usually gave to the prisoners and I also used to send their letters. However, between the years 1944 and 1945 the mailboxes disappeared. The Germans took everything away, so later I wasn’t able to do it for them. Moreover, I also endangered my father.”

“Then, the factories V1, V2 in Pfaffenhof were under construction. Prisoners from Theresienstadt concentration camp used to go there over the bridge in Litoměřice. They worked right under our yard. Prisoners were there and I was among them. However, they worked mainly under the ground. On the surface, there were only their implements such as pulleys which they used for pulling the material up or casting it down. But the construction itself and building of various concrete barricades was done under the ground. There were a lot of convicts. In the morning when we went to school, the soldiers usually went to their exercising ground, so we had no place to walk as it was such a narrow road, which had been built during the First Czechoslovak Republic. At the same time the prisoners were being driven somewhere on open trucks, both in winter and in summer only in such thin striped pants. They wore nothing warmer in winter.”