“I heard some rumors about the concentration camps. They said that people would die there within a week or they described the torture that they were being subjected there. But I was unable to picture or conceive anything so horrible. Only later, when I got to the concentration camps myself, I learned that it was true. [You learned about those rumors before your arrest? The rumors were spreading before you were arrested?] Yes, that was before my arrest. Some acquaintances – not mine, but somebody else’s – had been there and came back alive to tell about it. So I heard the stories, I heard that this one died there and that one had survived. And really it was within a short time. I was unable to imagine it would be possible.”
“Suddenly, we were free, we were in the field and there was no one guarding us. So we formed groups of people who knew each other and we marched on in these groups. We came to the town of Waren. I think it was Waren. We went across that town. I think that there was a creek or a river that we had to cross. We went across a bridge and then we followed a road. I remember one incident. There was a dead horse lying in the ditch and everybody – including us – tried to cut off a slice of its meat.”
“In 1943 the Gestapo arrested them and along with them they also took me. Since that day I was being held in prison in Budějovice and from Budějovice they transferred us to Theresienstadt and from there they sent us to Auschwitz for complicity in acts of high treason and dangerous to the Reich. That was how the sentence read. I had to sign the verdict and then they sent us to Auschwitz. We came there in April 1943.”
“There were so many fleas in that revier (Krankenrevier – note by the author). As I was sleeping in the upper bunk bed it wasn’t so bad after all. But for instance Mrs. Benešová, who slept underneath, she was all bitten by the fleas. Her whole body was covered by these tiny little dots, the bites of the fleas. She was an aunt or somehow related to former president doctor Beneš. She had fever and was ill. I felt pity for her.”
“They bragged in front of men. I was with Bělinka in the office and we had to clean it up. So it somehow got moving. I can’t really complain about any injustice. I didn’t spend a long time there either. In fact, we weren’t allowed to go anywhere and do anything. I also remember that Milada Horáková was there with us.”
Blažena Simotová, née Hovorková, was born on February 3, 1921, in the village of Myslín near Mirotice. The family of Mrs. Simotová had a farmstead and thus it was involved in agriculture. Blažena attended elementary and secondary school and thereafter she was employed as an assistant of doctor Vaňata in České Budějovice. Doctor Vaňata was providing financial assistance to the women of imprisoned men and therefore he was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943. His wife and the then 22-year-old Blažena Hovorková were arrested together with him. The young Blažena then experienced several Nazi concentration camps and prisons. At first, she was being held in a prison in České Budějovice, then in the so-called “Little Fortress” of Theresienstadt. This was followed by the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps, from where she was finally transferred to the branch camp in Neubrandenburg. Shortly before her liberation, she set out on a death march but the organization of this march disintegrated early on, in the vicinity of the town of Waren. Blažena Hovorková thus travelled back to Prague and to her native Myslín. After the war, she was employed at the post office in České Budějovice, where she worked untill her retirement. In 2009, Blažena Simotová lived in České Budějovice.
