"The children came accompanied, those people were separated from the children, the children then came to the Terezín ghetto on their own, there are memories of the fact that the children came in a poor state, the SS ordered a cleansing. When they were taken to the baths to somehow do the delousing of these children, it is clear from the memories that these children were afraid, that they had an awareness that there was a possibility of being murdered through rooms that look like bathrooms, but there is lethal gas let in. Josef Pacovský, who was the head of the delousing section, recalls that the children were shouting 'gas gas', the Terezín prisoners didn't understand, so they had to be persuaded that water would flow from the shower heads, so then eventually the cleansing took place and the children were placed in the so-called infectious barracks, these were the western barracks that were built opposite the sokol Hall, which served as a typhus station. In those five barracks, the western barracks, which were declared infectious, the 1,200 children were placed there, and fifty Terezín prisoners were called to take care of them..."
"At first they were buried in individual graves, then in mass graves, from September 1941 the crematorium started its activity, it's quite interesting, I watched some documentary and they were buried until September or October, even the maid ordered that a gravedigger, a certain Šelicha, should be on duty. He was supposed to be there, but in the end the Jews did it anyway, the Jewish commandoes dug their own graves and buried them themselves, but I guess they thought that somehow the former gravedigger who worked at that cemetery in Bohušovice could be involved. But then it ended and the crematorium started."
"The vast majority of the German, Austrian element were old people. And they didn't have the efficiency, of course, so at that point, naturally, they couldn't get higher up in the hierarchy, and so that image of those old Jews being crammed in those attics somewhere, without any sanitary facilities, without any needs... that image of an old woman or an old man asking somebody... take the soup, that kind of begging..."
Tomáš Fedorovič was born on 28 May 1976 in Ústí nad Labem. His mother was a nurse and his father a worker. His grandfather came from Ukrainian Halych (Galicia in Eastern Europe), where he fled from the Bolsheviks. He changed his name from Fedorišin to Fedorovič, which probably saved the family from being dragged into the Soviet Union. Although his family is not associated with Judaism, his lifelong research interest has been Terezin. He graduated from secondary school in 1996, graduated from the Faculty of Education in 2000, and after a brief period at the open-air museum in Zubrnice, he joined the Terezín Memorial, where he was working - for the twenty-second year - at the time of recording. In 2018 he defended his thesis on the mentally ill during the Protectorate. He has published two books on Jewish topics, History of the Jewish Community in Ústí nad Labem and Jews in Bohemia. In 2022 he was living in Ústí nad Labem.
