“For example, I lived in L 142. It was a huge building just next to the square. And we lived there on bunk beds and one year, it could have been a year after (we had been transported), we had there so many bedbugs that we could not sleep, we threw the straw mattresses from the windows to the yard and we slept outside. Fortunately, it was possible because if was summer. Then a disinfection group came, sprayed the whole building and we could finally come back. I went to work in farming at that time, then I became ill, I got tuberculosis, so I did not go to work. And when I got a little bit better I went to work to - there was a big riding hall, before, during the First Republic the officers had had horses there, and it had been all cleared out - and there on saw horses we nailed together coffins from unplanned boards for people because they died a lot; mainly old people died there because firstly, they could not handle it mentally and secondly, there was an extreme hunger.”
“...Rahm was his name, he had two German shepherds close to him, was wearing high boots, holding a small whip and was shouting at me in German: 'What do you want here?!' And I told him that I should take some letters upstairs and he shouted at me: Go out! So, I went out, back to the barracks. So, we awaited what would happen and at ten o´clock in the evening people brought narrow pieces of paper to the barracks and there was a number of the transport on the paper and they went to the transport. And I did not get the little piece of paper, I stayed there as the only one from the whole room and nineteen of us lived there. So when everybody left and I stayed there as the only one, I was walking through the empty Terezín and four of us met there, three other young women, so we said to each other that we would go somewhere else, to a different barrack and a different room and that we would live together.”
“There was self-government and because everything was in German, it was called Ältestenrat which meant Council of Elders. But to be honest it was there only to keep Ghetto functioning and in order. It may be truth that the superiors got orders from the SS men, but I do not know if they met with them. The truth is that all of them left but only in the last transport. Meanwhile, there were of course other transports, but I am talking about the October one because it was the last one.”
Dagmar Nebeská, née Poláčková was born on the 17th of February 1926 in Prague to a Czech-Jewish family. The witness was listed for transport to Terezín Ghetto in March 1943. She contracted hepatitis and later tuberculosis. She lived together with other twenty girls in barracks in Terezín; Truda Sekaninová, future Communist Member of Parliament was their educator. Dagmar spoke about her as a second mother. She worked in agriculture outside the Terezín Ghetto walls. She experienced last transports directed from Terezín to Auschwitz in October 1944 and also arrivals of devastated prisoners from death marches before the end of war. She studied business school and worked in Transport Enterprise after the liberation of Terezín.
