Ing. Věra Poláková

"My name is Věra Poláková. I was born on April 17th 1930 in Prague, I´m seventy seven years old. Before they transported us to Terezín I lived with my parents. My parents were lucky to return from the concentration camp, but my father died shortly after that suffering the imprisonment consequences. We went to Terezín in December 1941, when I was eleven. It was one of the first transports. They put us into those old fashioned carriages; I traveled separately from my parents. When we arrived to Terezín they separated us to men and women with kids. We were not able to see my father even though we were in the same place."

"When I returned to school I was supposed to attend the senior classes, but they put me to the first class of the Gymnasium, where I stayed until the graduation. It was very hard for me, because I didn´t have any educational base in any of the subjects. I had to constantly study and try to catch on the rest of the class. There was one teacher there who disliked me and was shouting at me that I´m the kind of a person who should never return from the concentration camp. And all that just because I asked my classmate to lend me a pencil or a rubber - I don´t remember anymore - during the art class. She saw me and this was what she told me. I started to cry and went home. I told my dad what happened. He went to school right away. At the end, this teacher was excluded from the school."

"When my father arrived to Auschwitz, they got off the train. Mengele was standing there and selecting people who´ll go to the gas chamber and who will stay for work. My father was in very bad shape after being arrested in Pankrác prison so they included him to the group of kids and elderly people. Although my father didn´t know anything about Auschwitz and the gas chambers, he went to this German and told him, that he´s an expert and he can work hard. The German just swung his arm and sent my dad to the other side; that´s how my father saved himself from going to the gas chamber. After he spent few days there, people who were there already for longer time told him: ´You see the smoke coming out of that chimney - that´s the rest of our transport.´"

"We left everything in our apartment just like that - that means, we´ve lost everything. They took us to the Trade Fair palace, where all people for the transport were gathering. They threw one old mattress or some hay on the floor and there we waited for someone to take us to the train to Terezín. There they separated us to men and women with kids as I already told you. Luckily I stayed with my mom; my father was sent to another barracks. We haven´t seen him for a long time. We were not able to meet, because there was a curfew on the street. It was possible only on special permission from the Germans. At the beginning I was working in agriculture - I was taking care of the geese. Later they have built some new wooden houses where the mica was being peeled. This production was very important for the war industry, because the mica was then being casted into blocks which were later used for aircrafts or tanks or other machines. The material was in sort of blocks and we had to peel the layers until it was able to band. Because this was top importance for war, people who worked there mustn’t have been sent to Auschwitz."