Hana Totušková

“After the liberation in 1945, we awaited our dad. We had no information. They had a quarantine set up there. Buchenwald was liberated by the Americans, and it was rife with typhus. So we were really frightened. When Dad finally came back, he was in a terrible state. He weighed only 48 or 47 kilos. Skinny, his teeth knocked out, no fingernails. Or toenails either. They’d stick things under their nails during interrogations, to torture them. He was in a terrible state.”

“Then I worked in the clog shop, where they made clogs. And I always had to come to work early. I had this one tall machine which had a kind of last on it. And as the clogs came by on the ring, I had to take the clog, place it on the last and burn out the mark and number from the bottom. But it had to be red hot. One time I came a bit late and didn’t heat it up enough, and it didn’t burn the marks. The foreman found out, he took all the badly marked clogs, came and threw them at me. It was terrible. He said: ‘Girl, don’t you know you shouldn’t continue work that started badly. If it doesn’t work, you have to stop the ring.’ When we stopped the belt, a red light lit up overhead. The foreman came running to see what was going on. When our machine broke down, he immediately sent for a mechanic. Then we paid a fine. We were supposed to make a quota of, say, two thousand pairs a day, and when there was some delay and we didn’t meet the quota, then the foreman got less money too. And he then cut a part of our wages. We got our wages every week. I got 420 crowns on my first payday. That was a lot of money for a week.”