František Šulák

“I worked in the main building, where the Gestapo, their boss, had their office. And we worked there in the attic and sorted clothes left behind the Jews, we sorted it by size and it was then being sent to the front for the army. It was in April and I had only a plain light shirt and light trousers, wooden clogs, and no hat. So I found a warm shirt for myself, I put it on under my light shirt, and suddenly a guard came in and the SS commander then found out that I had put on this shirt, and he said: ´Shoot him!´ But there was another SSman, a captain, probably the commander’s deputy, and he told him that he himself had allowed me to put on that shirt, and the blue cap I had also taken. But it was no use, for my punishment I was sent to work in a quarry. There was a penalty commando, which had to run up and down the quarry all the time. All the days, we would take the rocks from the bottom, carry them to the top, and from there we would have to thrown then down and this went on the whole day.”

“There were mostly all of us from the death march to Dachau, prisoners who had had no food. And their bodies were not able to cope with it when they suddenly began to eat. They got dysentery because of that, then typhoid as well, because we, who went through the death march, had been drinking water we found in ditches, with stale and what not, and thus we contracted typhoid. Those who have survived were lying there sick for about a week or two. The Americans washed us, deloused us, and provided medical treatment to us. Then, when we got somewhat better, they took us to Munich to SS barracks to recover, we stayed there for two weeks, then they washed and deloused us again, dressed us in SS military uniforms, only that they attached a Czechoslovak tricolour ribbon to the front, and they took us home, I mean to Pilsen to the train station. By this train I arrived to Ostrava-Přívoz, there we had to get off. And at that moment the Russians wanted to attack us, wanted to shoot us all because they thought we were Germans. But the railway guards who were with us stopped them. So the Russian commando, I don’t know who exactly it was, let us stand aside and then allowed us to go home, they only sent some guards to protect us, and so I walked all the way from Přívoz to Kunčičky. I weighted only 28 kilo. I came to our house, knocked on the door, my mother opened the door and when she saw a German soldier, she closed the door and would not talk to me at all, but then she recognized my voice and so she opened the door for me. She wanted me to eat dinner, but I said: ´I don’t want to eat anything.´ Because I was completely exhausted…. So I lay down, in a week I developed a serious case of pneumonia, my father brought me to the Fifejdy hospital and the doctor there tells him: ´You know, Mr. Šulák… Take him home, he will die on the way back anyway….´And when we left the hospital, I collapsed, I fainted and I did not have a clue what was happening next. I woke up only after ten or eleven days. My father called some folk healer, and she treated me with nettles. They would cut the nettles and mix it with sour milk, then spread the mixture onto a sheet and then wrap it around my body.”

“He needed a car to distribute those things, so he began to side with the Germans and they gave him a car. And his son was an informer and he informed against the whole group, telling them there was an active resistance group in the Radvanice sport club. And they arrested them all. I was also arrested, not because of this Klusák who betrayed them, but because of those guys. I spent about three months in the Ostrava regional court in jail. After three months I was interrogated and then taken to Brno to the Kounicovy dorms. By coincidence, Havlásek, the coach, was also held there, but we did not speak to each other and I paid no attention to him, because otherwise we would be all in terrible shit. So after being interrogated they locked me up, I was kept with three other inmates. Then I was sent to a work commando, we slept in a wooden barrack in the courtyard of the Kounicovy dorms. I was going to work at the Masaryk University, the Gestapo had its offices there. I worked there as an assistant to a bricklayer. And after the raid on the partisans in the Brno area, they started bringing in corpses, and we had to unload them from the cars, put them in coffins, and do all these things with them.”

“My worst experience comes from the Dachau camp when the Americans liberated us, for the prisoners were then squaring accounts with one another. To put it simply, each prisoner knew how every person was, who had been peaching upon on the others, who had been cruel to them. And none of those informers survived. They were simply beaten to death.”- “Did you witness something like that personally?”- “I did. They beat them to death, all his (the informer’s) bones were broken. He was begging for mercy, but it did not help him, and among the French and the Poles it was the worst.”- “The French also did it like those Poles?” -“There were French, Poles, Dutch, Italians, Germans, the majority was Polish, some Russians were also there. About 42 nationalities were imprisoned there, so it is difficult to judge. But the Poles were the worst friends. They would do anything for their own survival.”