Marie Kryštofová

Marie Kryštofová was born in 1927 in the village of Čehovice in the district of Prostějov. The family lived in Tvorovice. Her father, Jan Ondráš, was a horse trader, and had several children from a previous relationship (František, František Raimund, Anna, and Tomáš). Marie Kryštofová was one of seven siblings. Her sister Marie, known as Květa was one year older.[1] The younger ones were Berta, Aloisa, Hilda, Helena and Marie Soňa. The family lived in a one-room house with a smallholding. Marie Kryštofová recalled that her father owned six horses.[2]

[1] See her testimony in the database for further information .

[2] According to archival records, in 1936 the family lived in a wagon in Tvorovice; later, according to a report from June 1941, the family, which now numbered thirteen, lived in a cottage owned by the municipality. (ed.)

Marie Kryštofová was imprisoned in the camp at Hodonín together with her siblings, her mother Marie Tereza Ondrášová, nicknamed Pocrli, and her maternal grandmother Rozálie Enterová. On the way to the camp, they had no idea what awaited them, the girls even sang to each other. When they saw where they had arrived and the guards’ dogs started barking and jumping at them, they burst into tears. When they arrived, they all had their hair shaved off, even the little children. They spent the first night without food in a room with several corpses. Then they were housed in separate blocks for men, women and children. Only mothers were allowed to have small infants with them. They kept their own clothes, and were given clogs for their feet, which they wore regardless of the season or the weather.

Among the greatest indignities, she described the communal baths of women, men and children, when they all had to strip naked in front of each other. In the summer, they bathed in the adjacent stream. Their clothes were taken away by the guards and disinfected in large drums as a precaution against lice. They stood naked for up to two hours before their clothes were returned. The mothers were at least able to cover themselves with the help of their children.

They worked outside the camp, digging trenches and breaking rocks. Marie Kryštofová said that if a woman was unable to work, she would be beaten with a truncheon[1] by the guards. She remembered being beaten by a warder named Výroba,[2] who also worked as an orderly in the sick bay. Two prisoners transferred from another concentration camp to help with the surveillance were also brutal. They did not speak a word of Czech.[3]

If someone escaped from the camp and was apprehended and brought back, they were given exemplary punishment. Everyone had to line up and watch as the person was doused with water and whipped on a long bench. One pregnant prisoner[4] was beaten until her buttocks bled.

Marie Kryštofová was assigned to work as an assistant in the camp kitchen, where her supervisor was a Czech [Alois Churavý] who had a prosthetic leg. Thanks to her work in the kitchen, she was able to get her mother extra food.

In the camp there were also several wagons without wheels that served as mortuaries. Many died of typhoid fever, not only children but also adults. They were buried in the nearby forest behind the camp. Her sister Marie, known as Květa, worked in the camp as a nurse, and probably saved her family as a result: Marie Kryštofová recalled that she was already standing on the back of a lorry with her half-brother Tomáš and other prisoners, who were about to be taken to Auschwitz before the camp was closed down, but her sister came running and removed her from the transport on the instructions of the aforementioned Výroba. The fact that her mother had explained to the ​“top German” that she came from the Sudetenland may have also played a role. The mother and sisters were subsequently released from the camp, and Marie Kryštofová and her sister Květa helped clean out the camp after the prisoners had left, before they too were released [on September 20, 1943].[5] Her father died in Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.

[1] She probably meant a bullwhip.

[2] Wyroba/Miloslav or Miroslav Výroba, a guard who has some medical training (ed.)

[3] She meant German Sinti, supplied to the camp in Hodonín to ​“supervise their own people”, i.e., de facto to act as kapos (ed.)

[4] Marie Hauerová known as Gíza (ed.)

[5] In the published records from the camp in Hodonín, historian Ctibor Nečas gives the same date of release for all members of the Ondráš family — 20 September 1943 (ed.)

After their release from the camp, the family returned to their house in Tvorovice; it was still standing but was empty. The mother took care of her youngest daughter, and Marie Kryštofová and her sister Květa worked in Pivín at a farm owned by a family called Vrba to help support their mother.

After the war, Marie Kryštofová and her mother visited the place where they were imprisoned in Hodonín.