“Two transports of about 500 people each were sent out from Mladá Boleslav. We were in one of those transports. The day before the departure, which was on 16 January, we had to take our luggage - we were allowed 50 kilos per person. It was just me and my mother because my father had already died - he died in Auschwitz. So we had to take [our things] to Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk School, where we slept on the floor of the gym hall. [Q: That was in Podolec in Mladá Boleslav?] In Podolec. We had to wait there until morning, so we wouldn’t be too noticeable when boarding the transport at the main station in the morning. In the morning of the sixteenth we came to the main station, where the train was waiting for us. It was a passenger train, it was January, that is, in the winter. We carried some of our luggage ourselves, some were taken by our co-workers because we couldn’t have carried it - 50 kilos - by ourselves, of course. So then we went by train to Bohušovice because the trains didn’t go all the way to Terezín back then. We had to get out in Bohušovice, take whatever we could carry. It was freezing, the road was snowed up, and it was a two - or three-kilometre walk to Terezín.”
“It was in May 1944. We boarded the transport directly in Terezín, which already had sidings back then. It was a cattle wagon train, that is, one with a narrow slit near the ceiling. We could take hand luggage with us into each wagon, and there were 50 people for one wagon. There was a bucket of water for drinking and a bucket or two, I’m not sure now, for urine and faeces. We were crammed there, so when they sealed the wagon, closed and sealed it, the windows under the ceiling were boarded up so we couldn’t see where we were going, so we had to lay out the luggage all over the wagon and sit on it. The buckets were left by the entrance to the wagon. Hard to say how long we rode for, but I think that it was about thirty hours because we left in the morning, and in the night of the following day we stopped at the ramp in Birkenau-Auschwitz.”
“When the men and women transports left the dissolved family camp, Mengele - whether by someone’s orders or on his own initiative - had all boys around 14 years of age called up, and from those he chose about 90, who were still capable of surviving in the concentration camp for a longer period of time. I was one of those 90. Mengele asked me how old I was, I said I was fourteen. He mused for a while and then sent me to the good side, to the side that would still live a bit longer. I have a list of those who came back out of those 90, it contains some 42 names, that is, apparently, of those 90, it’s not exactly clear, some 42 were to have survived the war and are scattered around the whole world.”
“We were loaded into wagons. Seeing that it was January, it was freezing, so they put us into about one-metre-high cargo wagons, they counted out 130 of us to each wagon, so we stood one next to the other. We travelled like that for three days and three nights, until we arrived in Weimar in Germany. It’s hard to describe the journey. Of course, we couldn’t stand in the wagon for three days, so we sat down on the floor, and because some among us died, others went crazy, so they froze, we weren’t allowed to throw them out, so we sat on them all the way to Weimar. We were terribly thirsty on the way, I know that at one station, I don’t know which it was, back then the engines were still filled with water, with those trunks, so I know that they shoved the trunk our way at some place, so we could get at least a bit of water. There was a guard beside each wagon, so escape was out of the question. So we ended up in Weimar.”
Full recordings
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II. ZŠ Mladá Boleslav - Komenském náměstí 91, 21.11.2014
Otto Seidler was born on 5 February 1930 into a Jewish family in Mladá Boleslav. His father Emil worked as a trader in a company providing textile goods and haberdashery, his mother stayed at home. Otto began Beneš Primary School in Mladá Boleslav in 1936, but he was expelled in 1939 for his Jewish ethnicity. On 30 June 1940 the Mladá Boleslav Jews were forcibly concentrated into the local castle - this included the Seidlers. Otto’s father was arrested by the Gestapo on 27 April 1942 and imprisoned in the Small Fortress in Terezín; he died in Auschwitz in August 1942. Otto and his mother were deported to the Terezín ghetto on 16 January 1943. Otto lived in boys’ house L417. They were taken from Terezín to Auschwitz in May 1944; they spent several weeks in the family camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Before the family camp was dissolved in late June 1944, his mother was selected for labour and sent to Hamburg, where she died at the end of the war. Otto remained in Auschwitz with a group of about 90 boys aged 14 to 16. This group was tasked with various odd jobs in the camp. When Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945, he was placed into a death transport to Weimar and thence to the camp in Buchenwald. On 10 April 1945 the camp was evacuated, Otto was among those chosen for transfer, and he was moved around Weimar by train or on foot until 14 April 1945, when his group was liberated by the American army. Four weeks later, on 18 May 1945, he returned to Mladá Boleslav - one of the few members of his extensive family to do so. Otto completed a business academy in Mladá Boleslav in 1949, he then worked as a civil servant. Otto Seidler lived in Mladá Boleslav and died on June 26, 2022.
