“Surprisingly, you could smuggle things in there [the Postoloprty concentration camp - ed.]. Postoloprty was connected to Louny, the Czech staff travelled there by train, and there were some Czechs in the town as well. The SS took us [to the air field construction site - ed.] in big grand buses with leather upholstery, which we’d never seen before the war, which was a terrible paradox, but they had nothing else they could use. First we had to walk about two kilometres from the camp to the station, and then they [loaded us up there - ed.]. And during that part of the trip, seeing that we had to cross through the whole town, you could slip someone some ration tickets [mainly for bread - ed.], which were used both in the Protectorate and in the Sudeten Region. We then exchanged them with the American POWs, they gave us all kinds of things for them, they had tea, coffee, non-perishable food [from the Red Cross - ed.].”
“The Moravians had already started fleeing [the camp - ed.] because the Protectorate border was very close. When there were too many of them, because perhaps a whole half of the inhabitants were from Moravia, the camp commander declared during one roll call that if anyone else escapes, he will have everyone shot. And he placed two or four machine guns in each corner. So I didn’t wait for anything [and I escaped as well - ed.]. I was lucky because my classmate and great friend - we had lived in one house before [our family - ed.] moved out of Sušice - and she was employed at the police directorate in Pilsen, and she smuggled in a fake exit permit, which was required to cross the borders. Postoloprty were in the so-called Sudetengau, the Sudeten Region, that is, part of the German Reich. You had to have a special permit to enter the Protectorate. I didn’t have any other papers, they’d taken those when they locked us up. But I risked it because there were only old gaffers [guarding] the borders, as the youngsters had been summoned to the front. I counted on them being lazy. I really did manage to travel from Postoloprty to Louny on a short-distance train just with a permit. I hoped to get to Pilsen from Louny. I was taken up by the Czech railway workers in Louny. Because they said that the trains were sometimes checked by the German police or the Gestapo, so they took me into the employee’s carriage. I didn’t have a ticket, of course.”
“I set out by bike [to Pilsen - ed.] on 5 May 1945. It’s not far, I rode along a deserted road all the way to the T-junction in Pilsen-Lochotín, where the medical faculty is today. Back then there was a field hospital there in two buildings, with the conclusion of the Pilsen-Žatec road in the middle. And there was a restaurant there that doesn’t exist any more, which was occupied by the Hitlerjugend, brats aged from 12 to 16, whom Hitler had armed, given helmets, SMGs, and rifles. And they stopped me. I kicked myself for that afterwards, I knew the place very well, of course, so I could have avoided them completely by taking one of the side roads through the fields where the Pilsen University Hospital is today. But I didn’t know they were waiting in ambush there. Luckily, I was just wearing a T-shirt, torn trainers, and shorts with a handkerchief in the pocket. The Hitlerjugend showed me that if I had even just a knife, it would have cost me [my life - ed.] - they made a slitting motion with their hands on the throat... Then to my surprise they told me that the rest of the way to Pilsen was only watched by our Czech cops. So that was pretty tense.”
Hanuš Salz was born on 22 February 1922 in Pilsen. He came from a middle-class family, his father was a sales manager. In the 1930s the Salzes lived in Sušice, where the witness‘s father Heřman Salz worked at SOLO PAP. However, after the German occupation he was fired due to his Jewish descent, and so he returned to Pilsen. Hanuš graduated from grammar school in Sušice in 1941, and after completing a post-secondary education course at a business academy in Pilsen, he found work at a stationery store. In January 1944 he was assigned to forced labour at Cannon Hall II of the Škoda Works, where he trained as a bore maker. In September 1944 the Nazis imprisoned his father in the Terezín ghetto. A month later they incarcerated Hanuš in a concentration camp in Postoloprty, where they kept men with part-Jewish roots and the husbands of Jewish women. The prisoners were put to work on the construction of an air field near Žatec. In spring 1945 Hanuš escaped from the camp and hid in his aunt‘s house in Krašovice near Pilsen until the end of the war. After the war he worked at the Private Employee Illness Insurance Company and as a science and technology information specialist at the Research and Testing Institute of the Škoda Works until his retirement in 1984. The witness has dedicated himself to research on the history of aviation since the 1960s. He has written several expert publications. His most impactful work is the extensive two-volume treatise Letectví a město Plzeň (Aviation and Pilsen). His articles on aviation have also been included the representative municipal publications Dějiny města Plzně (The History of Pilsen) 2 and 3. Hanuš Salz lives in Pilsen.
