Ezra Perl

“It was almost impossible to get a container so we would use caps – a few, three or four, potatoes fit in. Sometimes we’d get some soup, but usually very little food. On the death marches there was no food at all! We’d sleep on graveyards because the walls made it harder for the inmates to escape. I remember once as we slept on this graveyard and I fell asleep with my head on a grave. The wake-up call came always at five o’clock in the morning. On the second death march we didn’t have any sleep at all. That’s when I learned how to sleep while walking. I got so accustomed to it that when I was back home in Hranice and we went for a walk with my wife in the evening, she’d complain: “You’re sleeping again!”

“We went on foot to Charlottenburg. A horse-drawn cart passed by loaded with sugar cane. The SS-man wasn’t watching, so I took a few canes. I said to myself that there has to be some vitamins and some sugar in it – that it has to have at least some nutritional value. I ate it and the next day I had a terrible shit from it. We were ordered to dig out a bomb, but I had to go to the toilet urgently, so I came to this SS-man and told him I had to go urgently. He started to shout at me: “Du Schwein! Du Drecksack! Du Jude! (“you pig, you dirty Jew!”). Well I told him: ”So what am I supposed to do? Do you want me to shit in my pants?” So he let me go. As soon as I dropped my pants that bomb exploded and ten Russian officers died and I saved myself sitting there with my pants down on the toilet. The SS-men weren’t there, they were sitting in a pub nearby. There was a beautiful pub in that place.”

“I have to say that the Czechs were very friendly, really friendly indeed. I’ll never forget how friendly they were and how well they treated us. I’d like to thank them from my heart for their kind behavior. Even though this Slatina, this village Slatinské Doly had a population consisting of 50% Jews, Romanians and Hungarians, we lived in friendship and peace with them.”

“Yes, he terrorized us whenever he had the opportunity. We belonged to this Jewish youth organization and went to train in a German gym because this Gajda wouldn’t accept us. He disqualified us from entering the Sokol. In order to stay physically fit, we were exercising in the German gym. We had a lot of trouble with general Gajda indeed. It was hard in 1938, on one hand there was Gajda, on the other the Germans.”