“He was sitting behind a table, had a glass of wine in front of himself and strawberries in some glass... And he started questioning me about what I knew, claiming that we had an illegal organization in our grammar school. But he also threw in the approval with Heydrich´s assassination, he got it all mixed together, he was just yelling at me and he wanted me to confess at all costs. Obviously, I told him what I knew, what Dvořák had said. Because it would have been stupid if I had not said it, but naturally I could not tolerate his mentioning that there was some illegal organization. But he wanted to get this confession out of me, so he always stood up and began beating me with a truncheon, and, well, it was quite painful.”
“When I transferred from Reichsbahn to Krankenbau, to a hospital in Litoměřice, this was a relatively good commando. While there, the nuns, Germans, would sometimes secretly give us some bread and butter. It was always packed in a black paper. I don’t know why. Perhaps so that it would look inconspicuous. And they also were making wonderful soup there, thickened with béchamel. That was quite something.”
“To be precise... I’ve never told this to anyone yet. So you are the first one to hear it. When we, I mean our transport, entered the block Nr. 9, in the first Stube (room) of this ninth block there was some Pole as the Stubenältester, but with a green marking. And when he saw me, he said: ´I would like to have this one!´ In Polish. But the leader from the 3rd Stube, Žemba, said: ´No, no, no, no, he will be in our room.´ And I think the reason he did it was because he knew what role I would probably have played if I had gotten into this first ´Stube.´”
A definition of national socialism which students had to learn in schools during the Protectorate. Miroslav Kubík recited it by heart even some seventy years after.
“Or another thing which really touched me was when I came to this Krankenbau. When they were taking away corpses, they were transporting them from the mortuary on some bier. They would take the body out, and a wagon arrived, it looked like this rustic hay-wagon. The prisoners would push the wagon there. And then the corpses were thrown onto this wagon without any piety at all. Just as if these bodies were things. They threw them there and pushed the wagon away. When I saw this for the first time...”
Miroslav Kubík was born in 1925 in Roudnice nad Labem. Both his parents came from Vienna, he had two elder brothers, Jaromír and Theodor. The whole family loved music, and there was often singing and playing going on in the house. After the fifth grade of elementary school he entered the grammar school in Roudnice. When he was in the sixth grade, together with other students he was arrested by the Gestapo from Kladno on June 20, 1942 and taken to the Little Fortress in Terezín, where he was violently interrogated on the very same day. After three months in the Little Fortress, where he was working in various commandos, including the much-feared “Reichsbahn,” he was transported to the core camp of Auschwitz on September 28, 1942, where he subsequently stayed in blocks Nr. 9, 28, and 4a and did mainly cleaning work. In August 1944 he was transported to the Dachau concentration camp, where the living conditions of the prisoners were somewhat better. He spent a year and nine months there. All that time he stayed in the Czech block Nr. 20 and was a member of several work commandos. On April 29, 1945 the whole camp was liberated by the American army.
After the war Miroslav Kubík completed his grammar school studies and was admitted to the Institute of Chemical Technology in Prague. In February 1948 he took part in the university students´march to the Prague Castle. Somebody recognized him and turned him in, which resulted in authorities causing problems for him. In 1951 he finished his studies and married Věra Menčlová. They have three children: Věra, Ivana and Miroslav. Up to 1983 he was working as a chemist. Miroslav Kubík died on 25th October 2021.
