Jan Trégl

“A Czech worker gave me a slice of bread one day, but the warden saw it and ordered me to take it out of my pocket. It was just a piece of bread! The warden slapped me so hard over my ear that I have been deaf on that ear ever since. Well, I have survived. There were six of us and I was the only one who returned...”

“If you found a piece of stale bread, you ate it. The hunger there was terrible, no one can even imagine it. I was so hungry that I couldn’t sleep. The worst of all was the period before you got used to it. It takes some time for the body to start using its own resources, and you feel terrible hunger in the period between. But I endured it...”

“I was taken to Pankrác, where I spent about three weeks. After three weeks we met in Terezín. All of us, the five who had been arrested in Brandýs, and I from Kostelec. There was Karel Lípa, then Wolf, and one man from the municipal office, whose name I cannot remember.”

“The two of them were told to get ready for duty. Karel Lípa thought that he was going home, for he had his wedding scheduled for Saturday, and we had been arrested on Wednesday. Karel told me that when he was interrogated the Gestapo man promised him that he would be home by Saturday for sure. But they were transferred from Terezín, they left, and then at the end of March there came a notice about their deaths. They had been executed: they died in Mauthausen. I had been sentenced to three months, and I was released on 18th March...”

“The four of us were sent to Terezín, and we shared one cell there. Actually, we got to know each other there, once we found ourselves together. Otherwise I wouldn’t even know it, because I knew only Knobloch, and I didn’t know about anybody else. When they interrogated me, they showed me a picture of this Knobloch, but I didn’t know him, I have never met him before. And so they sent me to Terezín, I don’t remember anymore whether there was some trial or not, but it was probably so, because they sent me a notice of my detention...”