Josef Pojer

“We were mighty surprised when we got there, because when we had listened to Radio Free Europe, it said that it was a severe concentration camp, but it wasn’t anymore. The Americans and the Allies attacked the camp and it was now for political prisoners. It was clean. When you came, you had a treatment for lice, they sterilized your clothes and gave us some disinfection, they washed us and put us to quarantine where we stayed until the morning. In the morning they examined us again and when they found a louse, even if it was dead, we had to go through the treatment again. We didn’t do anything, there were barracks and a yard and they let us on the yard when the weather was nice. Only once we went to pick potatoes for the camp. The prisoners had to work, they had to line up like soldiers, those were there longer, they weren’t in the quarantine, they had sandals and they clip-clopped like soldiers and those bastards guarded them with dogs. In the factories they worked under surveillance, but we didn’t get there.”

“First they took the Sudetenland and the people thought that it will stay like that, that we will the republic will survive. Jihlava was not taken, it was still a Czech city.”

“There was a man named Bardas, a German, a councilor of a Czech origin, but he was with the Germans. His wife was German and a bad woman. And he had to join the Germans and his responsibility was to deal with the reported persons, he was supposed to interrogate and arrest. He was arrested after the War. And I heard that he treated the Czechs well, he cancelled everything so that the Germans couldn’t find out. Czech informers went to him. And then he was arrested to be transported to Austria and they shot him in Stonařov and threw him in a well by the Inquart house. I asked the people in Stonařov and a colleague distiller told me that he wasn’t an eye witness, but they found a shot and drowned man in the well.”

“When a car was passing through the village, and there weren’t many cars passing, Venda (brother) ran across the whole village to see it.”

“The Heulos manor was built by the Germans, for the German youth. I don’t know much about it, normal people weren’t allowed to enter. Also here in Čížov, they wanted to educate German youth. We called it the pure race.”

“We had the advantage that we were allowed to receive parcels. So they sent us parcels from home, baked bread and meat from the pig slaughter. Food was on rations but in the farming business everything was done illegally, and they sent it all to us in the Reich.”

“So we decided to escape, because even older people escaped. So we decided to escape as well.”

“Look, first the Germans plundered the Jews, then the Czechs plundered the Germans. And they were moving to their flats. They had driven the Germans out to the playing ground (the Sokol playing ground) and from there they drove them to Vienna. Of course they didn’t want them there, so they were sent back and they were put into concentration camps. There was nothing left out of their property, everything was stolen.”

“And there I met with doctor Bláha, they arrested him right in the beginning of the war. And he did the entrance medical examinations, like when you come to a new factory.”

“We were four boys who worked in one workshop. We decided to split because four people would be too conspicuous. So we were two from Tábor and two from Jihlava. And we wanted to step on the train in Freising to get to Bohemia. The other two took the train from Freising and they got over the border. We were afraid take a train from Freising, so we decided to go to Landshut. And we were caught by a man in a car. It was four in the morning and he had a gun. He took us to Landshut, to a police station. The returned us to Munich to the police headquarters and there of course we were immediately arrested.”

“That was in May when my father was a major and I was distributing draft cards.”

“Most of the time we had the ‘eintopf’, which consisted of potatoes and beet and sometimes a piece of meat, then we had bread a small piece, 100 or 150 grams a day. It wasn’t much. When we got it we ate it right away and then we were hungry. We were used to it so it was enough. But we were hungry, compared to the times in the factory when we received the parcels from home. But we survived.”