Eva Selucká

“Girls and boys first. Single, roughly from sixteen to thirty-five. Their parents reckoned, well, they’ll be working, so they packed them a backpack like they were going on a summer camp. Something like that. They added in warm clothes. Those were the first transports, that was toward the end of March 1942; more followed, this time they took whole families. There were a lot of Jews in eastern Slovakia, and they formed a camp in Žilina...”

“There weren’t any other nationalities from Terezín there. Only German and Dutch women. So they started telling us about Terezín, and we began to long for it. They didn’t even speak about their homeland any more, just about Terezín. They also kept talking about food, and I wondered to myself why such intelligent girls keep talking about that subject. We weren’t hungry yet. The body takes about a week to get rid of the surplus matter it has, before all that is left is the bare essence. Then we understood why there was so much talk of food. We were quarantined there. One lady came down with scarlet fever. Two [women] died straight to begin with, she [died] of the fever. Then we had four weeks of quarantine. We were dreadfully bored - oh, that we could go to work, we said to ourselves. We lazed about on the bunks, told stories, sand. They only gave us coffee for breakfast, we only had a few potatoes at noon, with some kind of odd gravy or cabbage - something strange and watery - and in the evening we got a chunk of bread. At first it was a quarter, then a fifth, then it got smaller and smaller. Until we got nothing.”

“An awful amount of fleas and dirt, and when they wanted to eat something, they had to have it delivered to them and to pay a ton for it. It was dreadful. My mother came down with dysentery. One relative of ours lived there, she was originally from Bratislava. She lived there with her relatives from the other side. She started sorting things out for Mum to be sent to hospital. And Dad. Mum managed to phone to Bratislava that he shouldn’t go home. We had some friends, the husband was an official at the railways, the Bratislava roundhouse, Mr Háka, and his wife was an old friend of Mum’s. They lived near the train station, and whenever anyone went home, they’d stop by the Hákas. Mum phoned that he shouldn’t go home. So he slept over at their place, and the next day he found out what had happened, so he started sorting it out.”