"My grandfather and grandmother were there too. I only remember my grandfather because he was very devoted to me, and for example he made me a shop, a cupboard or a wardrobe or something like that, he was very devoted to me. And I have this memory that he was carrying me on his shoulders one time and there were two people walking next to us with a stretcher and somebody was lying on the stretcher and just this kind of work-worn arm hanging off of it. My grandfather told me that he was run over by the Germans because they were driving around like crazy... That's probably the only memory I have of my grandfather and my grandmother."
"The diet was terrible. I remember only once that I was standing in the queue with a dish pot and they splashed something in it, well. But I guess we were getting a lot of ... millet grains, yeah, millet grains. And when I came back, I couldn't even watch it, the millet grains. It was terrible, well." "What about the meat?" "I didn't know meat at all, because when I came back I didn't even want to eat meat. Because it was something that... It took a long time. First I ate sausages, and then gradually I learned to eat meat." "What about fruit, vegetables?" Daddy, when he had that workshop, that kind of workshop, there was a railway behind it, where they used to go there with those trains that took them to Terezín and things like that, and then they would turn around, I don't know exactly. Every time the train was passing, I waved to it. And once the engineer threw me an apple. So that was something for me completely..."
"When we were kids we were looked after by two ladies and I cut my finger off, so it's kind of mangled. On a folding chair. It folded, and my finger was cut off. Then they, again, it was very late, so they opened up like a school there. It was some kind of an flat where there was one big room and one small room, and in the small room we were first graders and in the other room were second through fifth graders. But that was also one for a short period of time, because then they sent the teacher to the transport and then it was over, well. Because I could already read, I could also write a little bit, so when the teacher went to the classroom where the second to fifth grade was, she sat me down behind the chair and I read to the others who were sitting there some book that she gave me." "And who taught you that?" "I guess I taught myself, maybe my mum, I don't know. I had some books that were left over from the kids that went on the transport, and maybe I had a book of my own. So I taught myself... I enjoyed it. And I also drew a lot, I have these drawings somewhere."
Petr Haimann was born on 29 April 1938 in Brno. His earliest memory is of the fortress town of Terezín and the barracks there, where he and his parents were taken in one of the first transports at the beginning of December 1941. His father, a project architect by profession, was in charge of the maintenance of toilets and staircases throughout Terezín. Because of his indispensability, Petr and his parents survived the entire war in the ghetto and avoided the liquidation camps in Eastern Europe. Most of Peter‘s relatives, friends and acquaintances ended up there. Petr Haimann recalls his visit to the Red Cross in Terezín, but also his daily life in the ghetto from the perspective of a child. The future architect showed artistic talent even then, and his Terezín drawings are a document of the times. Thanks to the cooperation with the Jewish community in Brno, these drawings were presented at the Institute of the Memory of Nations in 2024.
