Alexander Speiser

* 1928

  • "We returned on foot, dogs accompanied us all the time and whenever anyone deviated from the lines, dogs attacked him immediately. A car came and pulled up by us, with the Lageführer, Obesturmführer Jelinek. A Czech name of Slav origin. "Come aside. He took me to a car and then took me to his home. He had three sons. He asked them: 'From today... Do you want him?' 'Yes.' – 'From today you will clean and cook everything that my sons need.' So every morning instead of going to a BMW factory I was taken by an SS guard to Jelinek's house, where he had his family, and I cooked and cleaned everything. I reminded myself, I was the youngest boy at home and my mother, whenever she cooked, she told me, 'Come here, look at how I do it.' I responded, 'Mum, I'm not a girl, I'm a boy.' – 'You can never know what life asks of you.' So I cooked tasty things and boys liked it.

  • "My father was a month or a month and a half after a surgery and my mother... We sat together, the three of us, my brothers had already been taken to camps by the Hungarians, it was Horthy's policy that he needed workforce. My mother... My father laid a hand on my mum's hand, and my mother said: ,Son, I don't know what happens tomorrow, what happens the day after tomorrow, but wherever we get and you are with your father, take care of him. You must promise me this.' I swore, I promised to my mother that I would take care of my father. A promise was kept in our family. You said something and you had to do it. This was how we were educated."

  • "At midnight, two, three, I awoke. Weak, I dropped to all fours and crawled into a barrel that was there, I licked it inside all around for the remnants of food. While in this barrel, I felt asleep. In the morning, at five six o'clock, a truck would arrive, collect the barrels and the dead and put them on the truck. They go. They didn't see that I was in the barrel. A miracle: the truck drives and the barrel falls on the road just by the house where my father was. Directly. I crawled out of it, the driver didn't see that a barrel fell, I walked and saved myself. But they were very precise, the Germans, they were, a few hours before they recorded that there there were too many and here one too few, so they repeated it, I was like one more, and there they had on less, so in this way I saved myself

  • "One day they asked those who were weak and wanted to go somewhere where they would get more food and would work, to step out of the line. Me and my father stepped our, they gave us soap and took us to a gas chamber. We didn't know these were gas chambers and even if they had told us, we we wouldn't have believed. We stood there, waited and looked at the ceiling. They said we had to wash ourselves. We waited for water to pour down but water never poured down there, always only gas. Zyklone. And the gas failed. Suddenly they opened the door a told us: ,Get back, you are clean now.' We returned to the camp and didn't know we were saved."

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    Tel Aviv, Izrael, 18.11.2015

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Son, take care of your father.

Alexander Speiser as a child around 1941/42
Alexander Speiser as a child around 1941/42
photo: archiv pamětníka

Alexander (Alex) Speiser was born on October 12, 1928, in Nové Zámky, South Slovakia, in a Jewish religious family. He was the youngest of three sons. In 1932 the family moved to Český Těšín, where the father worked as a merchant. When the Těšín region was seized by Poland in 1938, the family returned to Nové Zámky, where they lived until 1944. In May 1944 Alexander and his parents were taken to a ghetto in Nové Zámky, from where they left for Auschwitz on May 15, 1944. Alexander and his father came through the selection as able of work, mother was murdered. The then fifteen-year-old Alexander found himself in a gypsy camp from where he later secretly moved, with 1,200 other younger boys, in the camp where his father was. After five months in Auschwitz in October 1944 they both passed the selection process and left for Dachau, from where they were transported to a camp in the nearby Allach. They worked in an BMW factory as cleaners, Alexander was later a servant for the camp officer’s family. On May 1, 1945, he and his father saw the camp libertated by the U. S. Army. They returned to Nové Zámky but shortly moved to Český Těšín. Alexander went to a grammar school there, passed the school-leaving exam in May 1949 and in the same month left for Israel. In 1950 to 1963 he served in the Israeli army, first as a pilot, later as a logistics manager. On retirement from the army he founded a private company. In 1962 he married and he and his wife had three children. In 2010 he was awarded a medal by the Czech Senate, in recognition for his achievements in spreading the good name of the Czech Republic in Israel. Alex Speiser lives in Tel Aviv.