“[When you entered - ed.] the house, you saw all those dead bodies. In a moment, they didn’t make it, not just because they were physically exhausted, but also mentally, it was one dead body next to the other; if you survived that moment, you could endure everything else, in my opinion. Terezín was no problem at all for me, but it was for my parents. That whole generation lost their family, their network, they lost everything, but for us who were fourteen, fifteen years old and if we weren’t brought up too spoilt, we adapted to the situation. The collective life and cultural life there was incredibly intense, we worked, so we didn’t have to worry and wonder what it would be like and what was going to happen to us. We had lessons there. Although there was a ban on teaching, we had lessons. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis was there, she taught us to draw.”
“[We] didn’t like that we were doing nonsensical work. At Terezín, all the things we did had some use, whereas there [in Auschwitz - ed.] we’d drag things along just to make us tired, heavy stones uphill, and then heavy stones downhill again. That was it. Then at the same time we had people among us who told us stories from books. When I came back to school, to the grammar school - well, I still struggle with Czech, with writing, and I didn’t have any maths, but as far as my Czech and literary knowledge was concerned, I’d say I knew much more [than my classmates - ed.]. It wasn’t until later that I was befriended by Jiří Musil, and we swapped books and talked about them. But there [in Auschwitz - ed.] there was a group of people who were sustained by wanting to survive. I didn’t see it as survival. We were there for quite a long time, and we were actually the first transport from which some people survived. Because it was July 1944 and Germany was being bombed to the ground, they needed workers, so they made a selection.”
“[We lay] one next to the other. Sick, nothing. Then we heard booming noises. At least we knew the war was coming to an end, we knew that, so they were coming to liberate us. So that sustained us, we lay there on the concrete floor, sustained by it - we had to hold on now, the end was nigh. And suddenly the booming stopped, and nothing happened for one or two days. I remember how unhappy we were, we reckoned: ‘They don’t know about us, they went past us.’ Suddenly, the broadcast blared up: ‘Uwaga, uwaga,’ meaning ‘attention, attention,’ in all kinds of languages, and we were liberated. The Germans had already fled before that. That’s how it was. You couldn’t even walk, nothing. Then something just as terrible happened: they opened the store houses and gave us bread, condensed milk, and goodness knows what else, and so many people began dying... I already had typhus at the time, or I don’t know what all exactly, and I was so sick that I couldn’t eat. I was saved by the fact that I couldn’t eat. Because then they picked me up somehow, took me to hospital, and there they put me back on my feet.”
Prof. RNDr. Eva Smolková-Keulemansová, DrSc., née Weilová, was born on 27 April 1927 into an assimilated Jewish family in Prague-Libeň in what was then Czechoslovakia. She attended primary school and then studied at the grammar school in Prague-Vysočany. However, at that time anti-Jewish decrees started to apply, and so the witness quit the school at the proposal of her father; she was employed at various Jewish workshops, at Kondensia, and at a toy manufacturer’s. On 6 March 1943 she and her parents were deported to the Terezín ghetto. At first she stayed with her mother in the Hamburg Barracks, then she was moved to the Jugendheim. She worked in the Terezín Landwirtschaft, which sometimes operated outside of the ghetto. In December 1943 she and her mother were taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they stayed until June 1944, when they were transferred to concentration camp Dessauer Ufer and subsequently to Neugraben (an auxiliary camp of the Neungamme concentration camp). In the last two camps she was put to clearing away the rubble left from bombing runs, but she was also assigned to other duties. In April 1945 she was transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was liberated by the British army on 15 April 1945. Seeing that she had suffered from typhus, jaundice, and tuberculosis and that she weighed 36 kilogrammes when she was liberated, she was taken to a sanatorium in Sweden to recover. She returned to Czechoslovakia in November 1945, completed grammar school, and went on to graduate from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Charles University in Prague. She took a lifelong interest in chemistry, she worked at the Faculty of Natural Sciences, focusing her academic research on chromatography; she received a Professor’s degree. Eva Smolková-Keulemansová was married three times. She passed away on February, the 27th, 2024.
