Eduard Daniel

In March 1943, all the Romani people were summoned to the Oslavany gendarme station. While they were being registered and fingerprinted, Eduard Daniel noticed that the list was marked ​“Auschwitz”.

Daniel’s family lived in a settlement in Oslavany, which had about seventy inhabitants. Some of them were taken to the camp in Hodonín near Kunštát as early as August 1942, from where they were released again thanks to bribes. This was also the case of Eduard Daniel. But they did not enjoy their freedom for long, as he said.

Less than a year later, in March 1943, the gendarmes deported most of the Romani inhabitants to Brno, where they were confined in the stables of the town’s slaughterhouse. Only the children of Daniel’s aunt Amalia remained at home in Oslavany – Antonín, Anděla, Anna, Růžena and Vlasta.

At the reception centre, they were herded into a building full of manure and dirty straw, like pigs, he said, and they stayed there until a list was drawn up for a transport. A German police officer, [Franz] Herzig, came there every day and decided who would be put on the transport based on racial characteristics. Daniel said that almost everyone was on it. Among those released was Anna Danielová from Oslavany, a Czech woman who returned to her native Zbýšov with her children, but her husband Cyril Daniel was taken away. Daniel’s mother’s cousin, Jan Daniel, also had a Czech woman named Lišková as his partner, but she was included in the transport with her daughter and son.

At the Brno slaughterhouse, some of the Czechs did not behave well and took advantage of the situation, such as the Protectorate policeman [Arnošt] Dubový, who took bribes even though he knew he could not arrange for the persons in question to be removed from the transport. Daniel saw with his own eyes how he took money from an old man of about seventy who begged him to intercede — Dubový took the banknotes from him, saying that he had already spoken to the person in charge, but at the same time he and Herzig were talking about something completely different.

Before the departure, men, women, old people and small children were herded into freight wagons, indiscriminately, and the doors were bolted and the train left. They had no water or feed or even a bucket as a latrine. They arrived at Auschwitz at nightfall, but the train stopped before the public railway station the fields, where trucks were waiting to take the detained Roma to the concentration camp. Daniel and many others, not only from Oslavany, did not understand German, so when the SS broke down the doors of the cars and shouted German commands, most of the Roma were left standing helplessly inside. The SS and their dogs therefore drove them out onto the waiting trucks with rifle butts. Daniel helped his seventy-seven-year-old grandmother Teresa, who was carrying a bundle of blankets, to get off; he held his aunt Leopold’s four-year-old son around the neck and urged the other, aged thirteen, to grab his trousers as he came down. In that way they managed to keep together and get on the same truck together. On arrival at the camp they were herded into the reception barracks. They had some food with them from home, but otherwise the situation in the place where they found themselves was catastrophic, he said. People had nowhere to lie down, and from everywhere came the shouts of children and the frightened wail of adults.