Glimpse of Reminiscences
Here you can find several reminiscences (stories, poetry) of our clients.
An Event in the Septima*During the period between the signing of the Munich Agreement on September 29, 1938, and the German occupation of our country on March 15, 1939, fascist oriented individuals attempted to seize power and inflict terror on the rest of the population and public life. At the gymnasium, which I was attending as a septima student, none of my fellow students thought that any of our professors was such a fascist. Soon we learned that Professor Podhajsky was such a person. One day, at the end of one of his lessons, this professor looked at the pictures of our two presidents, the first Thomas Masaryk and the current president Eduard Benes, hanging on the wall and proclaimed: "These two rascals have to be removed from here, too." He took the two pictures from the wall and placed them on the floor with the faces of the presidents turned to the wall.
Frantisek Chalupa was one of the septima students. Frantisek traveled a rather long distance from a remote small town to the school. He was very quiet and seemingly a timid boy who gave the other students little opportunity to judge whether he was well liked by the others. After the professor left the classroom, Frantisek got up from his seat, climbed up on a chair and hung the two pictures back in their places.
During the following break, Professor Pokhajsky returned to our classroom with the obvious intention of taking the pictures away. Seeing them hanging in their original places made him furious. Very angrily he asked who had hung them back on the wall. At that moment, each of us was feeling very proud of his own courage because nobody told the professor who returned the photographs to the wall despite serious threats that the whole class would be severely punished if the perpetrator was not identified. Then Frantisek Chalupa stood up and proclaimed very loudly and distinctly: "I did it." This was followed by a stream of invectives from the professor followed by the statement that the offender would be expelled from all the gymnasia in the country. Thanks to the bold and sensible attitude of the rest of the professors´ staff, this threat was not carried out.
Much later, after the war, our class met regularly once a year. A very modest, quiet old gentleman, a pharmacist from a remote North-Bohemian town, never missed the gathering. His name was Frantisek Chalupa. In 2001, when we were celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of our maturita (final examination) we received the sad news from his family that Frantisek had died.
Vladimir Mach
* Septima = the seventh year of the Czech gymnasium
Baumholder
An unscheduled train was ready to leave the Prague Main Station in October 1942 swallowing at least 400 passengers. It started to move at a snail's speed with the destination somewhere in Germany. None of the young passengers, not even the yelling German soldiers escorting them had any idea of the train's destination. It was only after an uncomfortable three day trip that the train stopped in a big railway station. We were ordered off the train into cold and damp autumn weather. Taking our luggage or bags, we set out on a four hour walk along a muddy road climbing up a slope under incessant rain. When we reached the top of the hill, I noticed another muddy road crossing the road we were walking on with a signpost indicating "Baumholder 4 km". Later I learned that Baumholder was a small mountain village.
After the four hour walk that night, we found that we were standing in the middle of a camp consisting of several wooden barracks. Each barrack contained one big hall filled with wooden plank beds in which at least 200 people had to be accommodated. The number of bed bugs which had been living there together with the preceding occupants of the barrack turned out to be at least five times the 200 inhabitants.
In front of the barrack in which I was ordered to find a bed there was a large hole freshly covered with clay. There followed an inactive stay of some days during which the only regular event was creeping twice a day through the mud into the barrack where meals consisting of a something looking like soup were handed out. After several days, I used my comparatively good knowledge of German acquired at the gymnasium to ask one of the soldiers watching us about the big hole outside the front windows of our barrack. I learned that 200 hundred Russians who had been living in our barrack had died of typhoid and were buried there.
Soon, I also learned that the camp was a concentration of human resources who would be distributed to different heavily bombed places in Germany to clear the ruins of buildings after the air raids. After a few weeks during which the only event was our trips through the mud to take our "meals," I learned from a soldier that the Germans were planning to send out a group of five people trained in particular professions - truck drivers and joiners, to build barracks for the forced-labourers in various areas of Germany which had been heavily bombed. I was very interested to get out of that boring coexistence with the bugs. When the Germans asked about our professions I answered that my profession was truck driver. In fact, I was a gymnasium graduate, but as I liked all things that moved on two or four wheels, I had already earned a license to drive trucks while studying at the gymnasium.
In a few days, five of us, two drivers and three joiners, were leaving Baumholder. Escorted by an armed soldier we walked down the muddy road towards the railway station. About half way to the station we suddenly heard voices of a large group of people climbing the hill. Soon we realized that they must be another group of Czechs who had been drafted for forced-labour. When we met them, we stopped for a little while. They were feverishly trying to get as much information about the destination of their walk as possible. Suddenly, one of them asked us if we knew a Vladimir Mach, who is supposedly held in that camp at Baumholder. The person asking the question was from my home town and brought me a letter from my parents, the first letter that any of the occupants of the camp ever received.
On the train we were traveling together with other passengers in an ordinary car. Our destination was a camp under construction near Mannheim, where I really became a driver.
Once, we had to interrupt our trip because a lady sitting in the same compartment claimed that one of us had stolen her handbag. It was only then that we realized that our appearance had changed so much that it justified her suspicion. We had to leave the train and were brought to the police station where we were searched. When the handbag was not found, we were allowed to continue our journey after several hours delay. That was the beginning of my forced labour in Germany.
Fifty years later, sometime during 1992, I was driving home from The Netherlands with my wife on one of the German motorways. When I approached one of the motorway exits, I was surprised to see a sign indicating Baumholder 50 km. That name had never vanished from my memory. The first epoch of my forced labour in Germany had always been connected with that name and I had always called it my Baumholder stay, although I had never visited that little village. Now I was wondering whether the Baumholder on the motorway sign was the Baumholder of my forced labour. Why should they indicate such a small place 50 km away from a motorway exit? It must be some other Baumholder, we thought. In spite of that, we decided in a second to leave the motorway and visit the place.
When we reached Baumholder we saw a town of about six thousand inhabitants in a hilly region dominated by a huge modern building. At a filling station we learned that during the war, there had been some camps for prisoners near the town. Nobody had any additional information about the camps because the area around the town was one of the largest American military training bases in Germany and closed to civilian visitors. The big building was part of the American base. The number of United States military personnel was greater than the number of the town's population. At last, we stopped near the Lutheran church because somebody advised us that the minister had contacts with the Americans and he could provide us with information about the location of the old labour camp in the training area.
The minister greeted us very kindly. The general who was commander of the training area was a good friend of the minister because the general attended services every Sunday. The minister telephoned the commander and we were given the rare opportunity to visit the training area. The minister drove us in his car to the entrance gate of the training area where we were met by an officer with a jeep. He escorted us to the commander's office. We had a long visit with the commander. He told us all about the training area and gave us a present, a paper weight made of the local rock. He assigned another officer with a jeep to take us round the area, which also has a military airfield.
He took us to the place where the forced-labour camp with the barrack where I had lived had stood. Near the spot where the hole with the Russian military prisoners had been, there was a little memorial with a Russian inscription. The officer told us that there had been a Russian delegation which had installed the memorial there. He denied emphatically that the 200 Russians had been victims of typhoid - all of them had been shot by the Germans.
Vladimir Mach