Author: Lucie Conková
Location: Lety u Písku
"There used to be wooden huts all over the place,” Mrs. Ruzicková said. “There were fences around them. There was a big house here, too. The man who lived there kept stealing food rations delivered by the Germans and stored them in the cellar.
They gave us spinach to eat. They called it spinach. I’m sure it was stinging nettles. It was full of sand. And as a side dish they added a couple of rotten potatoes.
I got four hundred dollars in compensation. But there is no way to thing to compensate people who lived though this.
It was a labor camp. We worked in a quarry. They gave us wooden mallets and told us to break stone with them.
It was exhausting. When we couldn’t work any more, theyêd use the mallets to break our feet and our legs and we had to continue working.”
She showed me her poor legs.
“Otherwise theyêd kill us. I was pregnant. One German kicked me so badly that I aborted.
Once we had a delegation of high-ranking Germans come to our camp. They talked to the Czech guy who worked there. The following day they took us to the town of Vsetin.
The Germans executed my fiancé in Prague, in Pankrac prison.
Men worked less than women. There several men to each woman in the camp. When it came out that people were sleeping together we got helped from one Czech woman who was finally shot to death.
I wouldn’t want to live though that again.”
Mrs. Ruzicková escaped from the camp. But before the war ended she passed through five more.
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