Marta Neužilová

* 1932

  • "Suddenly someone in the courtyard at six o'clock in the morning shouted, 'There will be a transport, there will be a transport. Go to the station, go to the station.' And so I ran to this corner, and that's where I was hiding. And then I see a small group of people coming from the bottom of the square up the hill towards the station. Because there weren't transports coming from the Small Fortress, they were smaller groups. And people with white bundles on their backs. I was looking at them. I didn't know why I had to run out. And suddenly I hear, "Martina! Mum was the last one walking with them. And they took her to the station, not to the main building, but to the side, where there were these little railwaymen´s gardens. It could have been twenty, twenty-five people. They were led by SS men from the Small Fortress. And a normal train came and they got on the last carriage. And I know that even the Gestapo men turned their backs on us when my brother and little Vrát'a came running afterwards. We were standing by the side of the little garden. Even the Gestapo turned their backs, perhaps they couldn't look at us. And my mother was the last to get in. That was the last time we saw her."

  • "Yes, it was just that some secret note came there, that my mother was thinking of us and regretting everything that had happened. Someone even gave us kind of cards and there was a little sun and some poem drawn on it. But all that gradually got lost, I have nothing left. The only thing I have at home - someone painted a bouquet of roses in a vase on a wall tile. I don't know how it was preserved. I have it framed at home. Someone painted it in the ghetto, some Jewish artist. I showed it to the museum in Terezín. I'll leave it to them in my will. Then I had a watercolor picture, a memory of Prague. A prisoner painted that in Terezín. But how did it get to us? Someone brought it to us. So I have already given it to the museum in Terezín."

  • "That's when you leave Terezín, there's a little park with a statue on the right and across the street there is a lower one-floor long building. That's where we were interrogated. It was done by putting us in a room, alone with my brother. We had to stand against the wall and it took an awfully long time. Then suddenly they brought my mum in and threw her into the next room. And now they threw us, too - probably policemen- into this room without windows. It was completely dark, we couldn't even see each other. Mummy said two, three, four words to us and a big roar started, shouting where we were. Apparently someone deliberately wanted to put us there, one of the policemen, before the Gestapo came to interrogate us, so that we could say something to each other. And then we didn't see our mum again until after the interrogations were over."

  • "In 1942, in August, they caught my brother and the Jews. They caught them while handing over [parcels for prisoners from the Terezín ghetto], it was on a tip-off. Because there was Mrs. John living in the house where we lived. Her husband had joined the Wehrmacht. She was Czech. She didn't like my mum, she was probably jealous of her. My mum was very pretty, and the lady was a bit disfigured. She watched my brother, watched him always get on his bike with his backpack and ride off. Mum always said, "This time it'll be the last time. I won't do it anymore.' Because she was warned by the Jews who used to come to the station with this two-wheel cart, accompanied by a policeman. Somehow they warned my mum aside that the Germans already knew about her. And she said then again that she was sending my brother for the last time. And this Mrs. John went to a certain Mr. Kraus, a German, and said to him, 'The boy has left again.' Somebody heard them in the corridor then. Mr. Kraus said, 'I won´t take it on my conscience. She [the witness's mother] has four children.' Mrs. John said, 'If you don't report it, I'll report it myself.' So they were already waiting for my brother, it had been reported. When he was handing the package over at the fortress wall, they caught them there."

  • "So my mum got addresses, she contacted people who were still in Prague. And then they sent us letters [for their relatives in Terezín]. Or my mother would put my brother and me on a train in Bohušovice, and we would get to Prague, get off, and someone would pick us up. They gave us medicine, letters, they sewed something in our coats. And we took it home to Bohušovice. I don't know how my mother made contact with the people in the ghetto. And my brother used to ride his bicycle with his backpack to those fortress walls, to the Terezín fortifications, and there he met with the Jews and gave it to them."

  • "My mum, when she saw that the transport had arrived, went to work behind Bohušovice. There were fields there, between Bohušovice and Terezín there were fields. So my mother borrowed a hoe or other tools from Chládek family and pretended to work in the fields. The Chládeks later confirmed to me how my mother did it. She told those who were going to Terezín if they wanted to pass on any messages. So they threw her addresses. Because at that time any contact with the internees was already forbidden. There were still a few people living in Terezín at that time, in '41, when the first transports began, who had not yet moved out of Terezín. And there were mailboxes. But the Jews were not allowed to go near it. It was documented that they tried to throw something in there and were hanged in an exemplary manner in the barracks in Terezín."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 28.03.2023

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    Praha, 25.04.2023

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I‘ll always have that endless parade of sad people with their bundles in front of my eyes

Marta Klicperová Neužilová in 1942, when she was arrested by the Gestapo
Marta Klicperová Neužilová in 1942, when she was arrested by the Gestapo
zdroj: Witness´s archive

Marta Neužilová was born on 29 July 1932 in Bohušovice nad Ohří as the daughter of a worker Stanislav Klicpera and his wife Olga. Her mother came from a wealthy German-speaking Jewish family, the Beers, while her father was a Czech of non-Jewish origin. When Marta was seven years old, her father died of blood poisoning after a work accident, leaving her mother alone with her four children. During the Protectorate, Olga Klicperová became involved in the activities of the resistance group V boj (Let´s Fight), which helped the families of political prisoners. From the autumn of 1941, she on her own helped Jews arriving in transports to the station in Bohušovice, from where they travelled on foot to the nearby Terezín ghetto. She served them bread and water, obtained from them the addresses of relatives, and later delivered uncensored correspondence and parcels for the prisoners. She also engaged in this activity her eldest son Stanislav and her daughter Marta, who was ten years old in 1942. In August 1942, Olga Klicperová and her two eldest children were arrested on a denunciation. Marta and her brother were interrogated by the Gestapo for several weeks, and their mother was imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto. After a year, Olga Klicperová was transferred to the Jewish cells of the Small Fortress and from there deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in December 1943. Marta and her brothers spent the rest of the war with their paternal grandmother. One of the younger brothers, Bedřich, died shortly after his mother‘s imprisonment. The siblings were not allowed to go to school, did not receive food stamps, and gradually their grandmother did not let them leave the house at all. None of her maternal relatives survived the Holocaust. After the war, the children lived under the care of a guardian in a single room, receiving nothing of their mother‘s or their relatives‘ property back. Marta trained as a shop assistant and in 1950 married Karel Neužil, with whom she moved to Prague. They had two children, but divorced in 1960. Marta then worked as an educator in a boarding school and as a hop grower. She graduated from secondary agricultural and secondary pedagogical school. After 1989 she entrusted her memories to historian Anna Hyndráková. She became a member of the Jewish Community, the Hidden Child organization and the International Women‘s Zionist Organization WIZO. In memory of her mother, she had Stolperstein - the Stone of the Disappeared - placed in front of her family home in Bohušovice.