Adolf Socher

“When our camp leaders were at the camp on 21 August 1952, some men came to check it and they were cordial. They turned out to be the State Security officers because one of the leaders was a student of Medicine and was in the troop, and that is why his mother made him report that they were scouts (because) otherwise they would expel him from the studies etc. So, he, when we were in the mountains in winter, it was the four of us - Dany, by his name engineer Miroslav Pergler, was there as the leader of the troop and he was there as a student, and he played the guitar beautifully every night. He kept on playing: ‘Life is just a coincidence, once you're down, once you're up,’ and we did not realize that he had already reported us. They imprisoned Dany, he was sentenced to five years for scouting, and he spent two and a half years in prison. I will have some photos later, so I can continue. And because he had a German Parabellum-Pistol which he used to bring with him to the camps in case something happened, Gaučík [the student who reported them] knew about it and he said that it was hidden somewhere. When they tortured Dany, they had no choice but to believe that someone had hidden it, so he reported it. They came to see me in the hospital, thanks to the doctor - she did not allow them to take me away, so my mom would always go there, and they would run through the park to get there before her. I had three or four interrogations.”

“Alois was in the French bank in 1939 when it started to be dangerous and when the Germans came, he tried to escape through Poland. Our Polish brothers caught and arrested him. He spent some time in prison over there and they were deciding whether to let him enter France or whether to return him to Czechoslovakia. Of course, they chose Czechoslovakia, so he was in Pankrac prison from 1939 and then in several concentration camps and then he ended up in Dachau. In 1942, my aunt got a telegram saying that he had died of pneumonia. Gestapo came to our house within two days. They chased me out of bed and searched the whole flat. When they went away my dad rubbed his hands and said: ‘You do not look for dead people.‘ We got to know after the war that he and another person worked in a quarry and that both escaped. His leg was hurt and that is all. We do not know if they shot him dead when escaping or if he just died, we do not know.”