Josef Klat

"We arrived there and they put us up on the top [in the former Mauthausen camp - ed.]. I still smoked at the time, and I had my car parked where the new museum and the offices are. There was a phone booth there and this kind of small parking place, and that's where I had my car. We were sleeping up on the top, and I had forgotten my cigarettes in the car, so I got up to fetch them. It was a lovely summer, a wonderful evening, the kind of summer evening with millions of stars in the sky, as there were no lights to get in the way - it really was possible to see them and there really were millions of stars. I took the cigarettes, and it got dark rather quickly, I went round by the steps that led through a short cut to the 'Rusenlager', the medical camp. You don't have to go round along the path, but you can take the steps which they happen to be repairing at the moment. And I walked up to them, they lead downwards, so I sat down, lit up and looked at the stars. It was really nice, kind of romantic. And then the crickets started, the crickets down there. But not just five or so, a million of them... The music of crickets! And all at once! And it was telling me: Jesus! Those are the souls of the dead, those that died. The ones you saw lying here... I had to run, do you know? I had to run. I couldn't take it, it creeped me out so badly, my heart was having a fit. I was completely weirded out by it... It's ridiculous of course, but it was such an awful feeling, I ran back inside, didn't speak a word, got in under my blanket, didn't tell anyone about it, not until later... And when I go there with a group, it's nothing. Not one bit, not when there are lots of people around. But when I'm alone there, when the fair isn't there, when I'm walking down there by myself, it can get pretty bad - because I see something here, something there, something reminds me... And it can get really bad then. The worst is when you see the friends that aren't any more."

"We started to get worried, life was getting pretty tough - everything was in short supply and a lot of people were being killed. Like when I drove the bread van down to the 'Rusenlager', I noticed there was a bus there, and that's when Bardoň and Láďa Vybíral... he killed himself on his motorbike, well they worked at the depot, they both worked on those buses, the ones that had their exhaust pipes leading to the inside. And now I saw the bus, and we didn't know what it meant, we just didn't get it. I saw the bus there, and there were people getting on it, with the windows painted blue, blinded, not really a big bus, I'd say it could take some twenty people. The bus left and then when we were back up top, we saw it come back, but right to the camp, right to the crematorium. We only found out later that people actually got on the bus for Gusen, there they unloaded dead bodies and loaded up the same amount for the way back: eighteen this way, eighteen back. We didn't know at first, but when we did find out, we started avoiding it. Then it got really bad down below, they got one loaf of bread for twelve people, but just twice a week. So you can imagine what that meant. We could see how bad things were, and we started experiencing the rough conditions in a completely different way; we were also wiser and hardened by the tough life, and tough life it was, just we didn't want to admit why. One [day] they sent us down below with a dung cart to block 4. So we drove down there, and we had to stop like this, the block is where you're sitting, the forehead would be the entrance, a large gate it was, and next to it was the entrance to the medical station, a window from this side, and then a door here, and we were to stop the cart in front of the door. I looked around, there was this line of Mussulmen [those inmates at the end of their strength and giving up completely - transl.] - starved out, skin and bones. They stood there, and inside there was one prisoner. I could see him walk here and there, and suddenly the door opened and they threw out a dead one for us to load up. So we loaded him up, and the same a moment later. So I started to realise that something was going on here. It was probably known, but we didn't want to admit it. So I peeked into the window, I saw two SS doctors in white coats, and standing beside them was Přemysl Dobiáš, a Czech, and he always came outside and took one of the prisoners in, and said something to him. And he noticed me and gestured for me to get out of there, so I did and that's where they were being injected. And he had to tell them they would be receiving an immunity injection or something, and we had to cart the dead up hill to the crematorium. He told me later on when we were talking about it, because I hadn't known him before that, he told me: 'Don't be silly! If they'd have seen you there, you'd have ended up the same.' "

"Those were also from Auschwitz, and the appellplatz was full of them. That was a lot of people, but they weren't Jews. They were normal prisoners, well, normal - Jews were also normal, but this wasn't a Jewish transport. But they did come from Auschwitz, as the Russians had already got that far. And now they arrived, and now the commander arrived and said that whoever was sick or weak, that they can take this sort of holiday for a while, and then they'll go back to work, when they're cured. And there were some hundred and eighty prisoners, about a hundred and eighty of them signed up for this, I was surprised at the time. I think there were a hundred and eighty of them, but that might not be quite accurate. They stood them up in front of the gate, but not by the laundry, but by sections 1, 2, 3, that's where they stood. The others went off to the wash room and through all the usual entry procedures, that was normal. And these others just stood there, and stood and stood and stood... That was in February [1945], night fell and they ordered them to the wall behind the laundry. They stood there, and it was dreadfully cold that day, eighteen degrees below zero some said, and what with the wind and all. We heard how they started, me, I was in section 6, so I saw and heard everything, and it went 'whooooo', how they started moaning... A friend came for me in the morning, Franta Kubík, who worked at the laundry, he also slept there, and he said: 'Come have a look at this.' So I went with him to the laundry. That wouldn't be possible normally, but things were already getting wild, that was in February and we dared to do all sorts of things by then. So I went there, and I looked out of the window, and there might have been twenty of them still alive. They were a sort of a tangle, how they had been pressing up to each other like bees. But the firemen had come to them in the night and sprayed them with water. So they were really frozen up. And now there were some eighteen twenty of them still alive, and an SS man came up to them, Farkač was his name, he was a Slovak German, and with him the head fireman Proschke, but he was a red prisoner, a Polish German. They had iron bars, and they beat the survivors to death."

"Those women really did survive. Not women, heroines. That's something I'll never understand, men couldn't survive that. One time I was doing drainage work, so I saw where the drains led, so me and Emanuel Blahoun and my friends the Spaniards... and I knew that there were cesspits in between the sections. That still has to be there, of course, so we went to get it. They had a cesspit there, and they had to squat above it like hens to do their business. Now when we arrived and they brought in the women for the first time and herded them into the wash rooms, behind the laundry room is where they had to be stopped, they rushed them down, and now we undressed - some upstairs, some down - but the women weren't to undress until down the bottom. And just before the shower room there's this other room, and they would send about a hundred of them in there, and we that distributed the bread, we had to take in the laundry, and their laundry, the stuff they took off, we had to put on piles outside - some was deloused, some burnt, I don't exactly know what was done to it. The Efektenkamer did that, they went through it and the women then got new prison uniforms. Of course we were curious how come we had women arriving. We saw how it was packed full in there, how they were herding them into the showers, and then there were barbers sitting in a circle all around them, and they had a bucket, a razor, and a brush like mason's used, really, a masonry brush, cross my heart... And the bucket was full of carbon, it smelled like carbon, but it was probably some sort of disinfectant for the lice, what do I know. And then the women came up, they had to stand there - some of them they cut their hair, some of them not, I don't know according to what rule or what, just that some they did cut their hair, they shaved them and painted them with the brush, and that was terrible, because some were bleeding how it scratched them, and [the barbers] were enjoying painting them even in the most sensitive places, it was just... That was mostly to start with, they quite get the kicks out of it afterwards. The first ones had it worst, because that was something new. It was terrible what those women had to endure, and did endure. Then they herded them out, gave them clothes - a shirt and trousers - and that was it. And clogs. And I reckon there were women there who didn't even undress for their husband. And now they had to undress in front of those SS men. And hearing their remarks and those of some of the prisoners... I wonder how they felt... One of them, she seemed like a granny to me, small and shrivelled - she mightn't have been more than 35 to 40 years old, but I was seventeen or eighteen myself at the time, and she was sick and worried... I didn't know if she was Czech, German, or what. And she was crying so piteously, the tears pouring out so, she could only sob, couldn't speak... And she was making one step after the other and falling again and again. She was dressed only in a long shirt, the trousers still clutched in her hands. She fell and I caught her and helped her up the steps, and she looked at me and said: 'Give them my greetings, my boy...' And died... She was Czech I guess, but I don't know who she was, no idea... And now when I'm walking down those steps, I see her and I see those women, and what they had to endure... And then they divided them up into the sections, and just imagine, they were capable of doing something that none of the men were, they even stood up against an SS man once."