Adolf Řehoř

* 1935

  • “My father died in a concentration camp. Another relative died in Auschwitz. My dad spent the first nine months in the Kounic Student Hall in Brno. Then he was deported to Gross-Rosen in Poland, and from there he was sent on a death march to Sangerhausen-Dora. When they got there, the prisoners were washed and left naked out in the frost for three hours, where they died one by one. That was in 1945, in February. We searched for my father through the Repatriation Office. We received a letter from one of his fellow prisoners from Ostrava, who remembered his number, that he had been deported there and died soon after. I have it all stored away, the letters and the reports. The last reports we received were from Gross-Rosen, two letters written in German. Dad couldn’t speak German, so someone must have written them for him, perhaps one of the other inmates. It wasn’t possible to write in Czech. He wrote to us from the Kounice Student Hall once a month (in Czech), and we were allowed to send him a parcel once a fortnight. Mum and his brother tried to visit him, but the Gestapo wouldn’t let them in at all, so they just stayed at the gate. We never saw my father again after he was arrested.”

  • “German was one of the obligatory classes right from the first year. We were taught by Czech teachers because we were in the Protectorate, not in the Sudetes. My wife was in the Sudetes. In Biskupice, which was the neighbouring village. Everything around this village was all the Sudetes. Zadní Arnoštov, Víska, Biskupice, Chornice, those were all part of the Sudetes, they belonged to Germany. And Jevíčko here, Jaroměřice, Velké Opatovice, that was the Protectorate. Jevíčko also had a German school, it had the Hitlerjugend and the German Kuratorium. I remember how they always told us: ‘When the Hitlerjugend march by you, you have to stand at attention and stay where you are and salute them.’ It was because we were scared, they were nasty, those boys from the Hitlerjugend. They owned the factory, Hotel Eden, and they had the German school. And they were raised to consider themselves something better than the other inhabitants. Those were children who mostly attended the German school, they had brown shirts, they swore at Czechs, yelled at them. I didn’t witness them beat anyone up. We usually just stood at attention. We had to use the salute at school mainly, when there was a celebration, say, of Hitler’s birthday or of the founding of the Protectorate on 15 March. We had to sing the German anthem and also Die Fahne Hoch. They taught us to do that.”

  • “It happened on 9 May 1945. The night from 8 to 9 May we didn’t sleep a wink, we were dressed. We were waiting if we would have to abandon the house and escape somewhere. We could hear artillery from the square. German soldiers were shooting into residential houses, I was scared. I know I just fidgeted on my bed in my clothes. The other citizens were also prepared for the worst. Lieutenant Colonel Max von Groll of the Germans shot himself in the square, towards morning. What happened was that we then saw a huge stampede of Germans in the direction of Zadní Arnoštov. They wanted to get to the West. At 12:55 the first Soviet car arrived; it passed through our town and stopped at our place. Other cars followed. They rounded up the Germans, disarmed them, and returned them to the town. Then they were escorted to the Sokol gym hall, where they were imprisoned. There was a celebration in the evening. All the soldiers shot rockets. By chance they set fire to the neighbour’s shed. They then extinguished the fire with buckets of water from on top of our roof, the second shed. It was a pretty drastic ending. I remember that during the celebration, they came into one house where they had adult daughters, so they wanted to have it off with them. They had a bucket full of liquor, which they drank from a cup. I know that [the daughters’] father ran in his underwear all the way to the town hall to the commander, to get him to call them off. Those were simply two drunk Russians. One [soldier] stole a bike, and the owner chased him until he caught him and took the bike back. I remember that as well. Everything calmed down by morning. There were just heaps of ammunition, heaps of weapons, cannons, etc. It took days to get rid of all that.”

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    Jevíčko, 21.04.2017

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No one should be forgotten

Adolf Řehoř
Adolf Řehoř
zdroj: sběrač

Adolf Řehoř was born on 28 June 1935 into the family of a carpenter; he grew up in Pardubice District. He had a brother three years younger than himself. His childhood was marked by doing the German salute, standing at attention while the Hitlerjugend marched by, and singing the German anthem Die Fahne Hoch. His father was one of the founders of the Communist resistance group among the workers in Černá Hora, who built the motorway there. The group printed leaflets, organised collections in support of the families of those who were interned in concentration camps, and disseminated the news from foreign broadcasts, among other things. On 11 February 1944 his father was arrested. That was the last day that Adolf saw him. His father was taken to the Kounic Student Hall in Brno. He was later deported to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Poland. From there he was sent on a death march to Sangerhausen-Dora in Germany. In February 1945 the prisoners there were washed and left to freeze naked in the cold. They died slow deaths. The Řehoř family did not discover the father‘s fate until June 1945. The story of his father and many other people from Jevíčko was the main impulse for the writing of Občané Jevíčka v nacistických věznicích a koncentračních táborech (Citizens of Jevíčko in Nazi Prisons and Concentration Camps), which Adolf Řehoř worked on for several years. As of 2017 the witness lives and is active in Jevíčko.