“In 1938, I was eleven years old. I was a boy whose only concern was to bake potatoes. We loved to see the soldiers as it was very interesting with them. They would have mock alarms from time to time and we liked watching them running around. I have no idea what they were doing at night and in the evenings. They had some search-lights there. There were a couple of spots that had been selected around Prague. There they had our best cannons, the 87, they could fire up to 11 kilometers and were very precise. The Germans then grabbed all of it – it was a feast for them. They turned it into so-called ‘Palposten’. One of them was across the depot in Střešovice.”
“The alarm-clock was set to about six in the morning. Then we had some time to wash ourselves. What I really hated there in the beginning were the latrines – they were abhorrent. But you know, you get used to pretty much everything, you even get used to the gallows. So we were sitting there like hens lined up on the latrines. We somehow managed to get through it. Then we had breakfast. It was some warm mash, I don’t even remember what we got. They split us up into labor commandos and we went to our working destinations where we were digging ditches. It was especially tough when it was freezing and the earth was frozen. We actually had to peel it off the ground. Then we loaded the earth on wheel barrows and took it to the railroad banks. After lunch, we had to go to work again and work till it got dark.”
“I was the first one to be drafted to forced labor. It was in August 1944. Then they called up my dad who had to go somewhere in present-day Poland. That was in October. In the meantime, my mom had to peel mica in the Jewish community. They worked in Hagibor, today, there’s a polyclinic in that building. The mica was used for purposes of the German army. They transferred my mom to Theressienstadt in February or March. So the whole family was split up. My sister – as the youngest one – stayed home.”
“In the camp, I was together with Jára Pospíšil who was a very famous tap dancer. Then there were some other musicians as well. So Jára Pospíšil was singing and the others were playing. It’s interesting that when these evenings were taking place, it was compulsory and they forced us to go there. Even though the singing was in Czech and they didn’t understand it, the camp commandant came regularly with his lady and they were sitting in the first row.”
“Interviewer: Should we have defended ourselves?” “The Germans were thirty or forty millions? We were ten millions. That’s rather easy. Although, we were well armed… But, in the end, England and France ordered us to give up the borderland. Our fortresses were very good. It’s a question if we should have started constructing them earlier. But they were impregnable.”
Vok Malínský was born on July 19, 1927, in Prague. He came from a mixed, Czech-Jewish, family. After he finished his primary education he continued to a secondary school based in Malá Strana. In the course of 1941 - 1942 he was dismissed from school on the grounds of the Nuremberg racial laws. Thereafter he attended a language school that he had to leave as well and had to start working for a wholesale trader with iron called Mr. Pelikán. He did his apprenticeship there and worked for Mr. Pelikán till August 1944, when he was called up to work in a labor camp for Jewish half-breeds in Bystřice u Benešova that was part of the training grounds of the Waffen-SS in Bohemia. He worked in railroad construction building a line that was to lead from the Bystřice train station to the individual SS storehouses. The war affected other members of the family as well. His father was a slave laborer in a similar work camp in eastern Poland. His mother had to work for the German army peeling mica. In February/March 1945 she was taken to Theressienstadt. His three-year younger sister stayed home with her grandfather. Vok came back home in May 1945 and with him his parents. Of the 35 people that were part of the broader family only a handful survived. After the war, Vok restarted his studies at the grammar school and tried to complete his education as quickly as possible like so many other youngsters. After he graduated from grammar school, he started his university studies in the field of military engineering. In 1948, he decided to enter the Communist party of Czechoslovakia but was dismissed from the party in 1952. He died in December 2008.
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