Karel Suchan

“Something happened in the Protectorate at that time. As far as I know, a certain student named Sudek shot a German policeman in Kladno. And we were to feel the repercussions. An SS man came running to us, shouting: ´All Czechs get out!´ I thought nothing could happen to me, for I was sick with scarlet fever, so I stood up and told him that I had scarlet fever. He got so angry because I opposed him. He didn’t care if I had scarlet fever or not, he had said ´all Czechs out!´ and I didn’t leave. So he simply kicked me out, and what was I to do – nothing. But one thing became apparent there: the solidarity, the cooperation among the prisoners. Two prisoners came to me, Germans, I don’t know them, I’ve not seen them before nor after. And they took me and one more boy – a medical student with pleurisy, he was a medical student, he knew it had to be treated –they took us to the hospital through a backdoor, and this way I got out of it.”

“The entire Brno group, including me, got released quite early. As soon as I arrived home, I had to take a bath, because I had many furuncles on my neck, this happened because of the sand and dirt as I traveled in hot weather. The medical students who were there would always treat it, puncturing the furuncle and squeezing out the pus. And I arrived home in this state and took a bath and my mom just exclaimed ´Christ Jesus.´ I told her: ´It’s OK, it’s all right…´ I still had to go to the Gestapo, and the way it normally worked was that you came there and they had you wait for two hours. I didn’t know what was going on. They might have found something, I was still afraid they would find the pamphlets in my desk at the Law Faculty. They didn’t find them, they didn’t have time for it. So that turned out well. But I still had to report to the police station in Bučovice every week.”

“Mine was a special case, because I stayed in a private house. I escaped and went to my aunt’s in the Czech-Moravian Highlands, and I stayed there for about two weeks, without reporting my place of residence. I didn’t go out to the village much. Nothing was happening, my parents wrote me that nobody had been looking for me, so I went back to Brno and applied for a course at the trade academy. Some men in leather jackets appeared there: ´Wie heissen Sie? Wie alt bist du? Wer ist der… Komm mit.´ The formalities of the arrest were summed up in the ´komm mit´ phrase. When I was in the concentration camp then, I tried to argue that we had schutzhaft – protection custody - but what was meant by this protection custody was just that these Gestapo men said ´komm mit.´ Now the situation in Brno was such that the Gestapo probably overslept somehow, they arrested very few people. Especially from Brno, they did not arrest too many. But I was among them. I went to Špilberk. Over Christmas they took us to Vienna, and it was just perfect there. I remembered from Good Soldier Schweik that there was that chapel, where the chaplain preached, so we even wanted to ask permission to go to that chapel, but they saw through us and did not allow it. But on the tenth, things started getting bad. The commander, some Mr. Czizek, called us and he took off his hat and said: ´Boys, look at my gray hair, I’ve been through a lot, but you are young, you will endure it.´ This was a sign that something bad was in store for us.”

“The concentration camp helped me quite a bit during the communist era. The reason was that in 1945 I declared that I supported socialism, but not the communist version. I support the national socialists, I joined the Czechoslovak National Socialist Party, which was a cardinal sin for the communists. This was one blemish I had. The other reason was that I was not of a working-class descent. My father was a grammar-school principal. He was neither labourer nor shock-worker. Thus, my personal history was very bad, but I have had the experience of being a concentration camp prisoner. Having been a former concentration camp prisoner eventually helped me in 1969. At the time I was to be dismissed from the institute. My name was on the list of those who were to be dismissed, but if they wanted to dismiss political prisoners, they needed to obtain an approval from a local district committee, and this committee’s chairman, Josef Nikl, was a friend of mine. He and I had carried corpses to the crematorium, there had been heaps of them everyday. And this friend was now to dismiss me. After that he told me that he had been to the district committee and told them: ´How can I dismiss Karel Suchan? …I cannot.´ We continued to be friends, and they told him, all right, do as you like. And he placed me in the library and nobody bothered me there.”