Emília Gáboríková

“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.”

“When loading, men who were still able to walk supported each other and thus got into the car... but those who were no longer able to walk went separately. It was horrible; they were put in the bags in which there had previously been cement or some other building material. Some were even still alive, still moving. Despite that fact, they were put in a bag and thrown into another car. Still alive. When they arrived, they were handsome, well-built men. They spoke Russian, I met them daily. They spoke Slovak as there were many Slovaks. In a concentration camp there also was a lot of Germans. They were handsome and well-built men, but if I didn’t see them for a month or longer, I couldn’t recognise them at all.”