Helmut Meewes

"Our director, with his party badge, a very strict Nazi, said - well, I want to prepare you, you will probably be our last hope. But it's also right, you should do something so that we achieve the final victory. We always had to hold ourselves so that we wouldn't laugh, because we knew exactly what the situation of the German Wehrmacht was and we knew that it would only take a few weeks and then it would be over. And then one day it happened, we had English class, and we were in the middle of English class, the door was ripped open. And our English teacher stood up, we all looked at each other and at the door - an SS man, officer, with a huge medal on his chest. He said - what did I hear, I'm not supposed to disturb the lesson? This is about our final victory! Shut up or I'll arrest you right now. And the English teacher said - you can't just do that. I'm a free man and I didn't do anything. You'll see what you get out of it. And I see the class now, fourteen people. In half an hour you will line up in the courtyard, I'll tell you the rest downstairs. He slammed the door, went downstairs, we were all hanging from the window. In the schoolyard there were already all the Wehrmacht cars, half a company of SS men. A desk in the schoolyard and someone sitting there with ink. We didn't know whether we shouldn't run away. And then Manfred, our anti-fascist, said that things are not eaten as hot as they sound. We went down slowly and then it started right away. - In line, step up and now I'm going to tell you something! We have two options that I can give you. Either, one option is, you volunteer for military service, or you come straight to the front, you get a gun there and you are immediately deployed to fight."

"Then we came to a football field in the middle of this small town. And this football field was actually the last two really bad days of my incipient imprisonment that I experienced. Because there was no food there either. A wall had been built around the football field, but it wasn't new, it was old. And over the wall, when we were there, for about two hours (I crawled into the old goal of the football, lay down in a corner, the others lay down somewhere else), the first parcels flew over the wall. I had my little parcel and didn't want to show it, because I saw - when the people threw something for us, three or four people ran, fought, tore the bread out of each other's hands. And then the bread fell down and they stepped on it, they only fought because one thought the other would get more. That's when I saw for the first time in my life what hunger can do to human feelings that had nothing more in mind than just getting some piece of bread."

"We marched for a total of four days. We walked about 35 to 40 km per day. There were a few breaks in between. If something happened, someone fell down in the column, heart attack or something, then he was taken away in the Red Cross car or simply eliminated by the Russians on the side and that's when he died and that's when they took him away at some point. It was quite uncontrolled. Only this column had its own rhythm. If something happened in the distance of three kilometres ahead, if there was a bottleneck, maybe a small bridge, then the flow narrowed and then it was so that we suddenly had to stop. That was sometimes very nice, because then we could rest a bit. I worked my way forward a bit to a.... There was a German driving a ladder truck. He knew the area very well, I don't know if he used to work there. He had a horse and a small cart, there was nothing on it, just a bit of food for the horse, hay and fodder. And he allowed me to attach myself to the back of the cart. To hold it with one hand, because that made it easier to walk forward. And I even learned later, in the course of the days, to fall asleep for a short time. While walking and while holding on. You can do that..."

"And in Krakow I had to change trains to Krynica. In Krakow I was sitting alone at the station, I had about three quarters of an hour and for the first time I saw a train going slowly past me to Auschwitz. The windows were covered with barbed wire. The people inside, I recognised them by the stripes they had, the striped suits, hanging inside the barbed wire. They were holding on and shouting. 'We want to be free, we want to be free, we want to be free'. And I then enquired, the train was going to Auschwitz. Probably even here from Theresienstadt. It was a train I will never forget. And later I myself sat on such a train. But I couldn't have known that. It was such a decisive experience for me, it completely turned my whole way of thinking upside down."

"And in Prague there was already a lot of shot-up stuff from the fighting that was there. And I remember very clearly that we drove through a street, it must have been here in this area, because we drove to the middle of Wenceslas Square at some point. I remember that well because I knew Wenceslas Square by heart from my nightly visits. I knew - that's where the cinema was then and that's where the... And as we drove onto Wenceslas Square, we were fired upon from the other side of the square from the roofs with machine pistols, machine guns. And my two (colleagues) said, we won't stay here long, come on, let's get out. And on a ceasefire, as they said at that time, where there was no shooting at the moment, Get out, he said, little one, run into the next number of houses on the other side and wait for us. And they came out, too, and the moment I was out of the street.... Wenzelspaltz still has a middle, a level that you have to cross, then there's another side of the street and then there are more entrances, shops and so on. So I waited, they came and then the shooting started again. And I saw two of my class who wanted to get out and were hit and fell down..."