Josef Trefný

"Then I got... If you were on 11 and you were down there in the basement, you weren't. That's where the bunkers are that you climb like to a chicken house, yeah, so I got 10 days of that bunker. During the day I went to work in that Birkenau, we were stacking cement. There were a lot of us condemned like that. And during the day to work, hard work, and in the evening, instead of going to the house, we went to the gravel pit. But then again, you're inventive at that age, and I guess I was like that. If I carried one or two sacks in all those 10 days, I just kept running, just kept running round and round, because it was a wagon. Now imagine, so many people waiting there, and the one, when he was waiting to get his turn to carry the bag, he got hit right away with the butt, kicked and punched like that. So I was running all the time, still running, and then some of them repeated it after me. So we kept running, moving around to keep, you know, well, and that's how I survived. Well, and when I came back after ten days to block twenty-three, and this is the second building behind the gate here, there was a German, a green one, a thief, in the other half, and when I came back he said, 'You, I don't believe that you survived,' because not many people survived, you know."

"I was in quarantine in the block 8A, 8A and 2A. And the total quarantine was 14 days before they let us go to work. And we were in 8A - upstairs, one big room, there were more of us, I don't know, 150 of us in that room, where Alexei Čepička was at the same time, with whom I slept in the same bed in the quarantine. And there was a Pole, the commander of the room, he was about 19 years old, and he had been there since 1940. And he was involved in the construction of the brick houses in Auschwitz, in the main camp, in 1940 at that time. And that was the former barracks, those areas of the Auschwitz camp, and all that's left of that today is the kitchen, the long kitchen, originally the military kitchen. And then the blocks were built around it. And the barracks in the camp were all destroyed during the war."

"I was offered escape by an SS man in 1944 in [unintelligible - probably Aschersleben] in Germany, where I was on detached duty in a salt mine. And there, at that time, we were already guarded by SS men who were taken from the ranks of the Wehrmacht. These were mostly people who were wounded, just sick, so they put them too, they put them in those SS ranks, but with a different designation, they had the designation of swastika, not the two arrows, but the swastika. There were about 500 of us. We lived there in the sugar factory premises and we walked about two kilometres to work down the shaft. The salt shaft, the former Rothschild shaft, was about 400 metres deep and they were starting to make a track, a railroad track, to that depth of 400 metres. It hadn't been finished as long as I'd been there. About 400 metres underground, they were starting to build an aircraft factory. These were the kind of sheds where they hadn't mined salt for a couple of decades, and they were sheds, I don't know, ten meters high, 100 meters long, without any supports, it held like a rock. And that's where the factory was starting to be built, the floor was being concreted. Work was being done there, machines were being brought down. And I was offered a job there by an SS man, a decent man, I'm not afraid to say it openly. Over the summer he had - he was about my age, maybe a year older - and this was just in the summer time in the forty-fourth year. So his wife came down there with two children, small children, and then I met him, he had something, some trouble, so they put him in the basement, they put him in the basement for a few days. Well, I myself - because I was already getting packages there - so I threw him something to eat, too, in that basement. Somehow we got acquainted. And Hansberger was his name, he lived in Berlin, and he offered me, when he would take his wife to Berlin again, so that he would move the closet that he had there, the summer residence there, that he would put me in the closet. In Berlin, that the war would be over and I would get out of the situation. I refused it, I refused it on the grounds that I was afraid that they would arrest my family here, and they did. Those who escaped, of course, they immediately took all the family members to the camp, that they either liquidated or lived there. That was such a common thing."

"They had a certain advantage, the Poles being there among their own. Right behind the wires, he [a certain Pole] dug under the wires somehow and got out, and of course, as a Pole, he had some support from the local population, which, in terms of communication, other nationalities simply didn't have. There was very little German spoken in that area. The Czechs also had a hard time getting along."