Hanuš Gaertner

“They established a family camp, which was special in that it had all types there, children, old people, and so on, so they’d have an alibi if the International Red Cross happened to come there or something, to see if the Jews were still there, because some people escaped from Auschwitz and told of the camp in the West, and so on. We were extremely lucky that we hadn’t been put through selection. Selection worked that when a transport arrived, Mengele and some of his Wacht-people stood there, and they sent one part of the people, the larger one, straight into the gas, and some few, perhaps they had some quotas that they could let the younger and more able people live. But in our case they sent everyone into the family camp. Before that they sent us into the showers, then they tattooed us, so I got the number 170284. Although the fact that they tattooed us was, as we later discovered, fortunate because the ones they sent to be gassed weren’t tattooed at all, they sent them straight into the gas, finito. So we had numbers, which in no way reflect how many people were there.”

“When I arrived in Prague in 1938, I wanted to join Maccabi Hatzair again. I searched for where Maccabi Hatzair was based in Prague. I entered Maccabi, and our rosh kvutza - our group leader - was Fredy Hirsch. He also played a big role in my life. We even did a summer camp in Bezpráví. When the transports started, Fredy Hirsch had a fantastic idea. He was also from Germany, from Aachen, he’d been living in Czechoslovakia from 1936 or so. He managed to get the Germans to make us a Jugendhilfedienst, that is, a youth assistance service, and so we could assemble, we even had permits and we could ride on trams in the evening, because Jews weren’t allowed to do that otherwise.”

“What happened: an order came that they were to choose some younger people and send them to work. So they ordered a selection, we had to come naked. In my case, the selection was conducted by one Schwarzhuber, who was the so-called Lagerführer; he was an Obersturmführer, something like a first lieutenant, and I think he commanded the SS guardsmen. There were towers everywhere, from which the SS guarded the camp. I’d never seen him before in my life, nor after. When he arrived, we had to say our number, no one asked for our names, and say who we were. I stood to attention and said: ‘170287, achtzehn Jahre, Schlosser.’ Eighteen years old, mechanic. He pointed to one side, and off I went.”

“On 10 August 1942 I also received a summons to the transport. Back then the Germans planned to build a railway siding from Bohušovice, which was the transports’ normal destination and from whence everyone had to walk to Terezín, so that the trains could go all the way to Terezín. So they loaded us into a BA transport, I was number 119, they put the young people there who were to work on the construction of the siding. But I didn’t work there in the end because I did other labour.”