“Then trains started coming from Germany and they used us to unload these transports. It was a real horror show there, I’ll tell you. I remember how a transport from Hannover came to Terezín, the sanitarium. More than likely they had had put together all of the insane people of Jewish origin from all of Germany. They concentrated them in Hannover and then sent them to Terezín. The scenes that emerged from opening up the wagons, yanking open the doors, were horrid. I often think back on this moment and I see Lagerkomandant Seidel standing there with that smile on his face, full of some sort of gratification, about what was happening to those Jews.”
“We left to Terezín, we boarded the train in Klatovy at the station. It took a pretty long time, it went the wrong way, through Prague. They always waited on the blind tracks before they let us go further. And our old aunt Anna had gone crazy during the train ride, and while getting off in Bohušovice, then there was no train to Terezín, people were getting off in Bohušovice, she was looking at the bunch of people. I was leading her by the arm and she said: ‘Get in front of these geese. Put them back. Look at all these geese!’ But it was people in front of her. I told her: ‘The geese will go back.’ We saw how it really messed her up. She went from the transport in Terezín to the so called sick bay.”
“Once the SS soldiers smoked some pork in the smoker in the kitchen. I’m not sure where they got it from. Then they realized that one of the pieces of the meat was missing. Of course, it had to have been the prisoners who had taken it, that much was sure. It was a huge ordeal in the camp. They were definitely the ones whole stole it. Everyone one of had to be examined by a dentist to see if we had smoked meat between our teeth. We didn’t, we didn’t. Then the old one decided, the one we him Cane because he was always walking around with a cane and hitting us with it on across our faces and heads, he was a real lout, a tram driver from Frankfurt. He said that if the guilty party didn’t fess up to what he had done he would have ten people hung and the entire camp’s stomachs pumped. They really started pumping people’s stomachs, they did it to ten, twenty people; they didn’t find a thing.”
“There were differences between the SS. Some were evil and some were very evil. But, to tell you the truth, during those ten months that I served in Schwarzheide, I got to know two SS men, two, who weren’t actually SS men. They were soldiers who’d been injured at the front who wore SS uniforms to watch over the prisoners. We called one of them Sorboňák because he told us that he’d studied at Sorbonne in Paris. He didn’t hit us or call us names, didn’t use the informal form of address with us, and was solid. So, there’s no reason to say that the others couldn’t have acted the same way towards us. Then there was a young soldier, a pretty endearing boy named Höhne. He was a Bavarian. Not only did he not hit us, not only did he not insult us, but sometimes when he would steal or get a half-loaf of bread, he’d come to the work-crew and bring it to us.”
“However, on 12 June 1944 came the order from the Berlin headquarters for the total utilization of the prisoners, as they were obviously having problems with a lack of workforce, thus our extermination was postponed. Selections began and that notorious doctor Mengele had his hands full. He selected us; I stood before him three times. I always had to strip naked. He had us examined, saying – Gut, gut. One was sent to the left, the other to the right. Nobody knew what to think. So they selected a thousand able young men from all of us. We were slated for work in Germany. This is what saved me from the gas and made me able to be part of the first live transport to leave Auschwitz. We were the first live transport, none had left before us. Either people died off there somehow, or they went to the gas chambers. Then Mengele picked out five hundred women. My wife and sister were among them. Then he selected another five hundred men and the rest, of which my other sister, brother-in-law, and mom were part, went, on maybe 10 July, to the gas.”
“I assure you that it was another terrible disillusionment because we knew that Auschwitz meant something bad. We didn’t have any concrete information. We arrived; they pulled the leaden seals off the train, because were blocked in. And then those ghouls tore into the train car. Madmen, fanatics, I’d call them. It was mostly Poles, prisoners with clubs. They beat us anywhere they could, the young, the old, thin, fat. They yelled, screamed, intentionally caused a panic. It was one in the morning, there was frost. And it was in this way that they drove us out of the train car and lined us up in rows of five. What else can I say, it was hell.”
František Schnurmacher was born 2 September 1912 in Běhařov in southwestern Bohemia as the ninth child to a Jewish family. His father fell during the First World War. In 1918 František began going to elementary school in Běhařov. After completing his fourth year in the lyceum in Domažlice, he began studying at business school and subsequently left to Prague for work. In 1932 he signed up for military service at the Kbely airport as a member of the army. In 1934 after completing his service, he returned to Běhařov and took over the family farm. In the fall of 1938 he was mobilized into the army to defend the nation against Nazi Germany. Until the end of 1942 he ran the farm in Běhařov, when the transport to the Terezín ghetto showed up. From there he was transported to the extermination camp at Auschwitz- Birkenau. In July 1944 he passed selection and was sent to a work camp in Schwarzheide. From his large family, only his sister Jindřiška, brother Pavel, and only one of his nephews, Harry, survived. Upon his return from the concentration camps, František was in severely poor health, suffering from tuberculosis, among other things. In 1946 he married Vally Blochová, who had also survived the Nazi concentration camps. The years 1947 and 1949 saw the birth of their two daughters, Helena and Hana. In the 1950s the family was forced by the authorities to cede over their farm estate. In 1963 they had to leave their family farm and move to a panel apartment block in Domažlice. František worked in the Klatovy Dairy and later in the Klatovy Poultry Works. His wife Vally was a homemaker. Considered politically unreliable, she was not able to work, though unofficially she did accounting work for the United Agricultural Co-op (JZD). In 1980 the witness’s wife Vally passed away, followed by František Schnurmacher himself in 1984.
