LH: No, we didn't know anything.two.
As I said, someone had looked through a crack in the train car.
We were in closed cattle cars, they weren't open.
And someone noticed a lot of water and said it might be Hamburg.
They had been tracking the direction somehow, whether we were going north or south.
And it turned out that they were in fact near Hamburg.
And they ended up much better off because they had these external commandos and there were a lot of French and Belgians there.
And they couldn't be checked, they had contact because they worked outside, removing debris.
So they couldn't be watched as closely, right?
Whereas we, on the other hand, were in a closed camp.
There were also Hungarian, Dutch, Polish and Russian women, but they had their own blocks in this huge camp.
We had a Viennese family with us...a mother with two daughters and the daughter-in-law.
They were from Vienna.
I even have the address of the...youngest, she lives somewhere in Australia.
And then there were two...Hungarian women with us, and a Dutch woman.
The rest of the women in our room in Christianstadt were all Czechs.
Room...just one room or so.
And there were only women there, SS-women as guards.
A female camp leader.
And as I mentioned, we were divided into different groups with three shifts every day.
A hour-long walk to work.
In Dutch clogs.
Horrible.
We could...not do that...the Dutch learn as children how to walk in those clogs.
We couldn't do it, it was terrible.
On the other hand, I have to say, I can't speak for the other masters, but this one master in the munitions factory in particular, he was incredibly decent and the medic too.
He was an older man, well past 60, and we had blisters on our legs of course and in...everything imaginable.
But we were scared to register as ill because that was the very worst, truly, you know?
You were taken away and you never saw the light of day again.
Well, the medic was so decent, he always said:
"So, girl, you just sit tight for a while. They can't check me."
He provided a bandaid or just bandaged the foot and said: "Yes, just stay here a while."
Sometimes he had a newspaper too, very inconspicuously because they were scared too, those people too, you know?
One has to understand that.
Sometimes he set down a newspaper and a piece of bread and...said: "Hey, you, put it in the bag."
IV: So there were also a few moments where they were decent...
LH: Yes, there were also people who felt ashamed, you know?
I think the medic was really ashamed.
Because he saw the pretty young girls, who simply...and he probably knew more, too.
I don't know if from the very beginning he...well, he was an older man, so he probably wasn't at the front.
But, but he had those people in the hand who were bad.
And he just let us rest a little, right?
He said: "Just stay seated a little bit. No one can say anything to me."
IV: Good. I would like to return to Flossenbürg.
LH: Okay.
IV: You said before that you arrived and your first memory was that after that long march you were given something warm to eat again for the first time.
Do you have other memories? Where you were housed in Flossenbürg?
You said you don't know how long...other memories of how the camp looked, in what condition...
I only know that there was a huge hall. A huge hall. And there were no beds there.
IV: And you were on the ground...
LH: Where we, where we, I can't tell you how it was later...as I said, we were so exhausted that we simply...
Uh, that is probably hard to grasp and to explain but we also had, for example, a woman with us who gave birth to a child.
In a barn.
Just before... we supported her the whole time, I traded coats with her.
Because, like I said, I already had it back in Theresienstadt, it had pleats in the back, that was modern at the time.
So the coat had this A-shape and was very broad, and I traded it with Anni.
And just imagine, the child is still alive.
Not the child {laughs}, he is an adult now, probably already retired.
So he was born in '46...what am I saying...'45 he was born.
IV: During the death...
LH: On March 6, I think.
IV: Did...
LH: On March 5 or 6.
IV: Mhm, so your...
LH: And...
IV: ...memory of Flossenbürg is really quite...
LH: quite minimal, because, as I said, we were totally exhausted that we...it had been weeks.
You mustn't forget, we had been on the road for six weeks.
It...when Dresden was bombed, when everything just...on the night of February 13 to 14.
We were close to Pirna and that child was born there.
In this barn and they got left behind.
We were terribly scared of course but she survived and the boy too, a little thing...could hardly be seen.
We were just six women in this barn and...
We just made a film with Ms. Hošková, a student from a film school.
Just two months ago.
And the professor who supervised these boys, he established the contact.
I told him about it and he got in contact with the boy who was born in the barn.
He lives in New York now.
His mother has since passed away and it is hard to explain, I understood her well.
Uh, there was nothing else to do.
Every minute counted, for survival.
At that point you just don't care.
IV: Mhm. And you didn't have to work anymore here in Flossenbürg. You were...
LH: No, we didn't work anymore in Flossenbürg.
No, as I said, we were...
He didn't even know how many we were by then and I only remember that we were given a white bowl {laughs} and hot soup.
And that was after so many weeks...that gave us courage.
But at some point you don't have any more strength left or hope, right?
But we had..when we saw how..
As I said, we were close to Pirna and they didn't even want to let us stay...we continued on to three more villages.
And no one wanted to even let us into a barn..to spend the night because the people were angry and knew that in Dresden...you could see the glow from the fire all the way there.
A red sky and the heat, it reached all the way there.
I can understand the people there.
They had been told over and over in newspapers and on television and on the radio, everywhere was victory.
And then suddenly they saw that Dresden didn't exist anymore.
And so they didn't know what was going to happen to themselves, right?
That was clear to them in that moment.
And they didn't know who we were either.
They thought we were convicts, not prisoners.
We were wearing convicts clothing.
And in winter, it was...we set off in mid-January.
IV: So that means in Flossenbürg...you basically just waited for the next transport.
LH: We didn't know that.
IV: Didn't know but you were so...
LH: We didn't know that.
IV: exhausted, you simply...
LH: We were finally under a roof and had something to eat.
And we didn't even know exactly...well, we had seen: Flossenbürg.
But where Flossenbürg was exactly, we only had a vague orientation, because we had traveled through Marienbad.
So we weren't that dumb, but we didn't know what it was, right?
IV: So you got there by way of....
LH: But they had...
IV: ...detours...
LH: intentionally...
IV: ...around settlements...
LH:... along dirt roads and other...
IV:...dirt roads to bypass the villages.
LH: And through the woods and just through the woods. So that we...
The only thing I knew for sure was that we went right through Cottbus because we were relatively well off then.
That wasn't that far from Christianstadt.
And that's when I became alert because I...bilingual there...
I hadn't known then that a minority of Sorbs lived there.
And that the minority was were very very, how should I put it... was very proud.
Still today.
I still have contact there today.
I am frequently invited to Bautzen and just recently they tore down a bridge there and suddenly there was a picture of me in a Saxon newpaper.
An old photo of them chasing me across this bridge {laughs}...the one that was torn down.
IV: {clears throat}
LH: And they also wanted me to identify the gym there, whether it was really the one... that was the only night that we spent in a brick building.
IV: {clears throat}
LH: The rest of the time we were in barns...or on haylofts.
And, as I said, this woman, the day before we had to climb a ladder to the hayloft and she fell.
And the next day her child was born.
In a different barn.
You know, if you can survive that...
The camp leader in Christianstadt, she knew that a few women were expecting.
And she came one time, two times a week to roll call and always said:
"We know that there are pregnant women among you and you should report to me. We'll put you in a home where you will be taken care of and can give birth comfortably."
But after all we had experienced no one believed that.
So we were constantly convincing our Anna and said to her:
"It is almost over and you have to hold on and you must not report it."
And she held on for a long time and one day she came to roll call and said: "I went to the camp leader."
We said: "You went..."
"Yes, but evidently the good lord didn't want it. I knocked but no one said 'come in'.
And I turn the door handle and it was locked."
We said: "That was the finger of God and you must never do that again!"
It wasn't to be and she really held on courageously.
And you know, that is once again the German precision.
We had to leave again....early in the morning after the child was there...she had fallen the day before.
There were French people there and they took rags from torn bed sheets and gave it to her and she set off the next day.
And then the baby was born and we had this really fantastic comrade with us and she wrapped the baby up in these rags and made him into a babuschka
The way Russian women carry them.
And it was barely noticeable...and when the SS man came in the early morning...no, not SS...Volksturm, opened the barn.
We were...there was a padlock on the outside.
We couldn't leave.
There was a latch with a padlock.
And Helene went like this and sat up and said: "Attention. Man in the camp!" {laughs}
And he was so confused, he didn't even notice that there was a pregnant woman there...or it didn't interest him.
He didn't care. He was sick of it too.
He was over 60 and had to walk with us, you know. So...
Yes, so he closed the barn again and locked it.
He came back after about a half hour and said: "So everyone line up. We are moving on and the woman with the child stays here. She will be taken care of."
And we were terribly worried and then one of us, one of our woman said: "I won't leave Anna here alone. Two..." and she was a very pretty girl.
And he said: "No, getting two women away is too difficult and, and, I'll manage it. I'll stay with Anna."
And he really stayed with her.
And we tried to delay it so that ...and he said: "A nurse is coming to get her."
And of course we didn't believe it. After all these experiences.
Yes, and then we got our black water.
It was supposed to be tea.
And tried to delay and slowly and then he started to scream at us: "line up, line up" and counted us.
And so we set off and then a nun on a bike passed us on the dirt road.
She had a suitcase on the back of the bike with the Red Cross on it.
A white...a white circle and a red cross on the suitcase.
And we said: "So that is a nun."
At least she was wearing a nun's habit.
By then we were so suspicious since anyone can put on a nun's habit, right?
But we said: "Okay, she is a nun. Hopefully the girl and the baby will be okay."
And of course....I didn't know any more about it. Until long after the war.
I had typhus in Bergen-Belsen...typhus was already there...was infested.
And since we had fled twice and constantly had to wait to join up with the next transport we were spared 14 days in Bergen-Belsen.
And that probably saved us.
Because if we had arrived on our normal transport, nearly no one would have remained.
But we were there with the women, with whom we had left Auschwitz, when they unhinged the train.
We didn't know whether...where we...had an idea that it might be Hamburg.
So they didn't have it far from Hamburg to Bergen-Belsen.
They even took the train.
And we were on the death march, right?
So in that sense they had quote unquote a major advantage
That they didn't have to walk and we all met up again in Bergen-Belsen because at the last minute as best they could...
There weren't any gas chambers there, but the people there died just from...
IV: debilitation, sickness.
LH: Exhaustion and, and, Typhus was there already.
And well, that is a very bad, bad memory, really awful ...but I can also understand it from the other side.
Then they called us to roll call.
So we walked over of course and lined ourselves up.
And stood, and stood and it was early April, right?
And no one came to count us....and the sun was out and we were so tired...and couldn't stand anymore and said: "what is going on, why don't they come to count us."
But we didn't dare walk away.
Since they fired shots immediately.
And suddenly there were airplanes above us and my friend, who stood in front of me, said: "Hey, that's that British!"
I said: "You're crazy."
And the airplane circled around the camp and came back and I saw the English emblem on the bottom of the airplane.
And then...in that moment there was huge chaos.
Everyone standing for roll call all over the place.
Those who were still well off ran off immediately, the others stormed the camp.
Because there was still wash and fabric and all kinds of things that they stole.
And the food camp, right?
And like wild animals but we {clears throat} we were so weak, we were probably already...and the British didn't come right away.
And when they came they were so horrified, they had known but not believed it.
And when they saw it with their own eyes, they were so horrified and were also scared.
So the first thing was that the camp was closed, strict ban, armed.
The strict ban on leaving the camp and a white flag was hung out.
Typhus.
And they were not prepared for that.
And that lasted a day and a half, then they came with these huge cisterns with disinfection and flushed everything away.
Then they took the dead who were already in piles.
And the dying who wanted to go to the latrine but couldn't manage it anymore.
And excrement everywhere, it was unimaginable.
And they washed that all away.
Then they removed the dead and the dying.
And they didn't go into the blocks until next day.
And we were already infected by then.
IV: Mhm.
LH: Then they...a doctor arrived with his redunance and he said to me...it was also unimaginable pyschologically. {laughs}
He took a lead pencil and marked my forehead with a black cross.
That meant I was already infected.
I didn't know that at the time though, that they did that.
And then he went through the rows and separated the healthy from the infected.
And I was put on a stretcher and brought to the shower.
And took everything I had away from me.
I was put under the shower and showered and washed and I don't know what.
And then they put me on a white sheet, I remember that, a wonderfully clean linen sheet on a stretcher and carried me away, And that's all I know.
I didn't wake up again for weeks.
IV: Because the typhus was so strong that you were really...
LH: I was in an infirmary in Celle.
A yound blond man in a blue uniform sat at my bed and introduced himself.
He was Belgian, his name was Erich Pleures, and offered his hand and said: "Oh I am so happy that you woke up."
They were medical students. Belgium was also occupied.
And since typhus was there...they sent them there so that they...
Because there wasn't any medicine. Either you survived or you didn't survive.
So we made it and on July 14, 1945 I...
There was a ...the Swedish government...I don't know if that is known here.
The Swedish government made an offer that whoever wanted to could go to Malmö for a half year to recuperate.
And then the people could go back to wherever they came from.
Lots of people signed up, some stayed there, which was actually not allowed.
But a few stayed, a few came back.
I wanted to go home.
I...not until Prague at the station where the Red Cross nurse stood...since the transports were registered.
Red Cross nurses stood in the train station hall.
And she greeted me and said: "Where can I bring you to?"
That was when I suddenly realized....that I udnerstood that I didn't have a home.
I had no idea if anyone had surv...I knew that my father wasn't there.
That my brother might have survived...perhaps...I wanted that so badly, he was, after all, only 32 years old.
No one, absolutely no one.
Only one cousin survived, she was from Austria because it was my mother's youngest brother.
And when the Czech Republic was founded, the Czechoslovakian Republic, ...before we had been part of a monarchy.
This youngest brother simply remained in the monarchy.
We are right on the border, right?
And that is why all my cousins were Austrians, Viennese.
And this Marianne...quickly got married in the hope that they could stay together.
But they couldn't of course.
Her husband was the first....because men were more in danger.
So her husband made it to England but she was captured by the Italians and put in an internment camp, not in an concentration camp.
She was in Italy...and she was...College for Design and designed clothing, buttons.
That was her profession, that means she had to learn to sew so that she could actually create what she had designed.
And with sewing in Italy, she could actually ...good...
She sewed uniforms and survived the war there and is still alive to day, thank god,...and we meet each year.
She lives in London.
And is exactly two months older than I am.
IV: Frau Hermanova, we have to come to the end slowly.
LH: Yes, we are already.
IV: I would like to ask one or two questions...You are sitting here today and speaking to us....How was it after your liberation, when you returned?
Was that an issue for you? Did you speak with people about it? Did people want to listen? How did that develop.
LH: {shakes her head}. Not at all. Not at all.
You mustn't forget: I didn't have a roof over my head.
I was in a reception camp again.
It was the holidays, we have holidays in July, August.
And in the schools...because Prague is so centrally located, so people from Austria, from Germany, mostly from Poland, from everywhere, came out of the concentration camps and wanted to return home.
Hungarian, Polish, Russian women, and Prague was the city they went through.
And since it was holidays they set up the schools for people to spend the night, as reception centers, so I knew then, and they brought me there.
And I was there for I don't know how long, a week maybe.
And then the Jewish community provided me housing for a few days.
A few days...and then I recalled a distant relative who lived in a mixed marriage and I had taken care of his stepmother a bit in Theresienstadt.
We were distant relatives through my cousin...but quite distant.
And I said: "Maybe someone there is alive."
And then...I couldn't walk yet, after the typhus...
The doctor, the Belgian medical student, told me: "Why do you want to go home? You can't even stand up. Go to Sweden."
No, I want to go home.
So I said: "I have to see whether..." I knew the address.
And there had been a two year old girl there back then.
I said: "Okay, but." And she was Catholic.
And I knew that she wouldn't get divorced.
And so I set off and when I got there I saw the name, that she still lived there.
Rang the bell and he came, this distant...brother-in-law of my cousin, yes, the brother-in-law of my cousin.
And he opened his arms and said: "Oh that is so wonderful, come in, come in."
And mother spoke of how good you were and that you had looked after her."
Because when there was a little extra bread that the children didn't eat I brought it to the old lady.
And she was Austrian and I don't know if you know this but ...I don't know why but the Austrians were not, not even the elderly, were not sent on.
She survived in Theresienstadt.
And the stepson, from two marriages. There were four boys altogether.
And so he already knew about me and this stepmother must have praised me more than I {laughs}...did what I could...when a little milk was left over.
We would have had to throw it away...who throws away food?
I don't and certainly not in Theresienstadt, right?
So I also brought it to the mother of my former boss, she was there too, I also brought her something once in a while.
Anyway, he told me that he had not been home the entire time, that he had lived in hiding, in cellars and under...in passageways and kept moving and using fake names.
He had fake papers and didn't want to endanger his wife and child.
And the cook there who worked for them.
She had been with the family for many years and saw the children grow up and was...the simple people were usually more decent than the others.
And she often brought him... rode the streetcar a lot because there were few men there.
And when she worked the night shift, she always let him spend the night.
Took a big risk, right?
And she had two single rooms, was a corridor with lots of single rooms.
A common bath, an annex, on apartment house.
Mansard apartments.
And she let him spend the night in one of these rooms.
And when I got there he asked me "where do you live?"
I said: "Well, I don't live anywhere yet. I don't know."
And he said: "You know what? I still have that room there at Žižkov, it is empty. If you want you can live there.
IV: So you moved in there.
LH: I moved in there and then with a woman who I met on the train ride home..."
We had...because Pilsen was on the border then and the Americans were there, right?
They had to withdraw from Pilsen.
We stood there forever.
And then this woman came up to me and said: "Where are you going?" I said: "I don't know yet."
And she said:"Hey, whoever gets a flat first, we'll stick together." She was considerably older than I was and alone.
She kept telling me that I strongly resembled her sister.
So we stayed together and from there, that was another coincidence.
There were the pogroms of 1946 in Poland and many Poles fled and I was working for the Jewish community as a social work.
After a year, when I could stand again.
Until then I had lived from support.
They asked me.
And I couldn't work yet, I was still registered sick.
And then I worked at the Jewish community as a social worker and when the pogroms began in Poland, the director of the community came to me, the head, Dr. Illtis.
And said: "The families that survived and were reunited...
I can't separate them again. I have to ask the people who are single or alone to have understanding.
We have to send people there to the border.
We went there...There are camps there and for the Polish citizens."
At the time Masaryk was our foreign...