European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

At night, nobody knew anything, it was empty, cold, we were hungry.

We get up in the morning, opened the door and there, in front of us, were four transports of Czech Jews.

We came on 17th January, and those transports from Czech I guess, came definitely earlier than us.

They were, I can say, close to death.

After the first night, one of our colleagues died.

We took him out and waited.

We did not manage to put him down and those Czech Jews jumped on him like vultures

and everybody took clothes or whatever from him.

I will never forget this sight.

Even now I have it in my dreams them jumping onto him, all of them, falling down because of starvation,

they were Muslims, in the camp language.

So with the next dead body, next day there were two or three dead bodies, we undressed them.

You see, during one night our mentality changed.

Those who did not have warm clothes started undressing dead bodies to have something better,

we had to get used to new conditions immediately.

Hiding a Jew, Maria, at home

The daughter of a lawyer, a Jew, his name was Holzkener,

his daughter Maria, I took her out of the ghetto, when the ghetto was being built,

when the wall was built, I took her to our place,

so that she could live there, and for the whole time till my arrest, she lived at our place.