Statement

written with Petr Lang, born 21. 8. 1924, former prisoner in the concentration camp in Litoměřice, Jewish nationality, profession locksmith.

I was deported from my home in Jihlava on 22. 5. 1942 to the Theresienstadt ghetto. For almost the entire time of my internment there, I worked in the farm and this saved me from the transports in the fall of 1944. My parents also held on until then, because my father was considered a severe wartime invalid, but they were placed on the fall transports as well. My sister was sent to Auschwitz on an earlier transport.

On September 28th, 1944, I was put on the first so-called labor transport, which took us to Auschwitz. I stayed there until October 8th, 1944, when I was transported to the Kaufering 3 concentration camp. On January 5th, a transport carrying 850 people (most of them Jews) left Kaufering. Many of our friends volunteered to be placed on it, because it was rumored that the transport would go to Litoměřice and we wanted to be closer to home and to Theresienstadt. On January 7th, 1945, we arrived in Litoměřice, where I remained until April 24th, 1945.

When we arrived in Litoměřice, there were about 5,000 people in the camp, the majority of them from the concentration camp in Flossenbürg. The population was composed mostly of Poles, Russian prisoners of war, Yugoslavs, and other nationalities. Very few were Jewish. The conditions in the camp after we arrived are characterized by the death count in December 1944, when roughly 1,800 people died. During my stay in Litomerice, many other transports arrived from Buchenwald, Gross Rosen, and other concentration camps. In April, 1945, the number of people in the camp rose to 9,000.

Our transport, which consisted of the Jews from the Kaufering camps, was housed on a block that was already fully occupied with 600 people. We were packed into the same space. Each block had four-tiered bunks. There were no straw mattresses, no blankets, only a bit of straw. Most of the prisoners couldn’t find a spot on the bunks, but had to sleep on the bare floor.

Our daily schedule looked like this:

Walk-up call at 3:30 AM.

From 4:30 to 7:30 AM we had to stand during roll call.

The work day was from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM with a very short stop at noon.

At 9:00 PM we had to stand during roll call again, which lasted until at least 10:00 PM, so we received our soup, our main meal, around 11:00 PM and went to sleep around midnight.

Lack of sleep, hard work, and the exhaustion they caused, were the main reasons for the high death rate, alongside infectious diseases, especially dysentery as well as abdominal and spotted typhoid fever. Of the 200 Jews from Theresienstadt who came to Litoměřice from Kaufering, only 3 returned. These were: Dr. Hardeck, who worked as a nurse, giving him a slightly better standing, Renné Dub, and I. Many of our friends were among the victims of the Litoměřice concentration camp, including Heinz Schuster and Gert Körbel.

As I previously stated, the work day was 12 hours long. Work was very hard, underground, and consisted mainly of loading rocks and other backbreaking work. There wasn’t enough food, we got 40 dkg of bread per day, 1 liter of thin soup, and minuscule so-called Zulagen, much less than in the  Kauferingconcentration camp. Their treatment of us was also very bad, although we interacted very little with the SS. But when the SS did interfere, it was horrible. The SS had trained dogs, which they turned on the prisoners. It was mostly the capos and head workers who would beat prisoners and beat them to death. The Poles (Aryans) were especially cruel and had anti-Jewish attitudes.

Out of the Aryan prisoners, only some of the political prisoners treated us well, especially the Czechs.

In April, the camp was slowly liquidated, and the Jews were sent to Theresienstadt. I was on one of these transports, arriving in a wretched state in Theresienstadt on April 24th, 1945.

Petr Lang

Signature of witnesses: Robert Weinberger

Marta Kratková

Alice Ehrmannová

DocumentationCampaign:Zeev Scheck

23. VII. 1945

On behalf of the archive: Alex Schmiedt