“We walked all the way to Terezín. They caught us at the border, and we were thus locked up in Lovosice for about five days and from there were walked over that meadow to Terezín. Into the camp. And from Terezín we were going to work.”
“A train was dispatched from Prague to Jihlava, it was about half past ten. When we came to the Wilson train station, it was about half past four or so. And we were told that the train bound for Jihlava would be dispatched at half past ten from the main station. It departed. I thus had myself transported to Prague. They [said – author’s note] that they would take us to one village where there was some camp. But I did not want that, I walked to the Wilson train station immediately.”
“It was from there that they transported us to Gross-Rosen. I worked there nearly for two years, and as the war front was pushing here, and the Americans were already in France and the Russians were pushing in, too, we thus went from there… in a death march, as it was called. We left Gross- Rosen and we walked to Dachau.”
František Cvingráf was born November 28, 1923 in the village Rudlice near Znojmo in the then Czechoslovakia. He completed elementary school and then he apprenticed as a tailor in Únanov. From 1942 he was sent to do forced labour near Dresden where he worked for the railway company. He and his friend attempted to illegally cross the border back to Czechoslovakia and to visit their parents, but at the Protectorate border he was arrested and subsequently interned in Lovosice and in the Small Fortress in Terezín. Then he was transported to the concentration camp Gross-Rosen, where he worked in the infamous quarry. From there he was taken to Hersbruck near Nuremberg where the auxiliary camp of the concentration camp Flossenbürg was located. The end of the war was drawing near and František Cvingráf had to undergo the death march from Hersbruck to the concentration camp Dachau. On April 19, 1945 he was liberated by the American army in Dachau. After the war he did his military service and then he worked as a tailor and as a switchman for the railways. At present (2015) he lives in the village Tuchlovice near Kladno.
