Alois Grůz

“Dad wanted to see me again because he knew I was at school. So he asked the guard to let him see me. The guard allowed it but watched him to make sure he wanted make a run for it. So he said goodbye to me, and then the Gestapo dragged him off to Šumperk, where he remained for some time, and then they took him to Mírov. They told the women that they could come visit him. They always went in twos or threes with a parcel of some kind. When they arrived, they pulled a joke on them and said that the commander had banned visits. One time, when he was still in the court prison in Šumperk, I came to visit him. We could’t tell each other anything, not even a whisper, and they cut it off after a set amount of time.”

“He came home weighing thirty-five kilos. I was afraid of him, and I didn’t come home for several days. I stayed at my grandma’s. I was afraid of him because I was stressed out. You could see his bones coming out. He also had stomach ulcers, which didn’t help either. When he was interned in Poland, he worked at a tannery, so he told me how they washed the leather in chlorinated lime to get the hairs to come off. They washed it in the solution to have just the clean leather. Dad said all his fingernails came off from it. They didn’t have any gloves. He was there for about half a year.”