Jana Marhoulová

Jana Marhoulová was born in Silesian Ostrava, but grew up in Prague. Her father [Jan Lagrin known as Fasi] was a musician who used to play at weddings. Her mother [probably Stanislava (Anna?) Lagrin] sold haberdashery in Kačerov. Jana had an older sister Marie, who later married took the name Kačírková. Jana entered the first class of primary school at Pankrác. She wanted to become an artiste; she and her sister went tap dancing at the Lucerna.

At the beginning of the war, her father would be absent from the home for extended periods of time in search of work, until he was arrested in 1940.[1] Her mother supported the family by working in a haberdashery shop. Jana Marhoulová recalls, for example, a harsh winter when there was a shortage of fuel and there was nothing for it but to scavenge for coal in Vršovice along the railway line. Her mother met a new partner [Jan Šefčík] and she gave birth to a daughter, Františka [Horčičková].

In 1942, Jana Marhoulová and her family were deported to the camp at Lety near Písek. Men had already been imprisoned in the camp, but now whole families arrived with children. They were told that they were going to work on a farm, but after arriving at the camp members of the family realized they had been tricked. The women burst into tears and the children joined them.

She remembered as very humiliating the procedure of their body hair being shaved off, when women were shaved by men, even their private parts. Their heads were also shaved because of lice. They had to wash themselves, and were given prison clothes in place of their own. Regardless of the season, they went barefoot because their original shoes disintegrated and they had to bind their feet with rags.

Men and women were accommodated separately, only the children’s quarters were for both boys and girls. Jana Marhoulová was housed with the younger children and she described how the worst part was their pining for their mothers. They slept on bunk beds crammed together and had only straw palliasses to sleep on. The small stove was unable to heat the wooden hut and they suffered from the cold. In charge of the children were two female prisoners, the Vintra [Čermák] sisters.[2] Jana Marhoulová recalled children dying of hunger because of them.

The toilets were located in a long building and consisted of ten holes – five on one side and five on the other. The women went there to chat because the guards were not able to follow them.

The camp was guarded by Czech warders, and work in the camp, such as in the kitchen, was performed by selected prisoners. The food was insufficient: in the morning they were given a quarter of a loaf of bread and white coffee, in the afternoon soup with beets and a piece of potato. The food was cooked by inmates, but it was said they used to steal it from others. The kapos Ferštl, Robert and Fríd were also selected from among the inmates,[3] but they were not answerable to to the Czech warders, only directly to the camp commandant [Josef Janovský].

During her internment, she did not meet civilians from the surrounding villages, even during her forestry work outside the camp. But she remembers one intense encounter. As children, they were allowed to go swimming in the adjacent pond, where in those days the women from the camp did their laundry. Some of the children had the opportunity to hug their own mothers. Then the women called out to Jana that her grandmother was there. She was standing near the woods, holding a headscarf with food, and with her there were also two aunts – her mother’s sisters. It was an emotional encounter for Jana Marhoulová, because her grandmother had raised her before the war and Jana had a very close relationship with her. However, she was torn away from her grandmother by the guards, and her grandmother was caught by them and beaten up.

Jana Marhoulová also did not escape punishment and was beaten. She was also punished on another occasion when she was supposed to be guarding two boys in the woods, but they escaped.[4] When their escape was discovered during the evening roll call, Jana Marhoulová was given 25 lashes and then locked for three days without food in a wagon, that stood alongside the wagon used as a mortuary.

Initially, the dead were still placed in coffins in the camp and taken to Mirovice to be buried, but later, when the number of deaths began to rise due to illness, they were buried without coffins in a pit dug behind the camp.

When [typhoid] fever began to spread in the camp, Jana Marhoulová’s younger sister Františka also fell ill. She was placed in the sick bay and her mother brought her extra food from what was left by the warders, whose quarters she used to clean.[5] She would smuggle the leftover food into the camp hidden beneath firewood. Her elder sister Marie, who had been helping her mother with cleaning for the warders, also fell ill with typhus. Probably thanks to her Marie’s connections with the guards – Jana Marhoulová specifically mentioned favourably the warder [František] Maxa – her sister was treated in hospital and her mother was able to take her daughter Jana to do the cleaning instead of her. The family was then released from the camp at Lety [on 21 January 1943]. When they were released, they did not get back any of the necklaces they had when they arrived, nor any other possessions, but at the time it did not occur to them.

[1] Jana Marhoulová learned about his fate only after the war. Jan Lagrin was imprisoned in the camp in Hodonín near Kunštát, where he was one of the most feared kapos.

[2] The children were cared for by Josefína/Josefa Wintrová/Vintrová, née Čermáková, and her sister Antonie Janešovská/Janašovská, née Čermáková. (ed.)

[3] The brothers Friedrich and Robert Waitz and Leo Gross, who were transferred to the camp from Auschwitz I on 6 October 1942 to act as kapos. (ed.)

[4] Most likely Ladislas Stockinger, then twelve years old, and his friend Josef Vorba. (ed.)

[5] The guards’ quarters were located outside the camp gate.

After her release from the camp at Lety, Jana Marhoulová lived with her grandmother, who died in 1945. She then moved in with her mother and began to stay away from school and run away from home. At the age of 15, because of her truancy, she was placed in an institution for six years, a so-called reformatory run by nuns. Her first husband was Rudolf Hauer known as Očko, a famous Prague accordionist, with whom she had a son.