Rudolf Daniel

Rudolf Daniel came from Oslavany. Their camp, ​“Písečňák”, had forty-eight caravans, mostly painted yellow, green and red. They stood in two rows, each on an unrendered brick base or on stone supports. The camp survived in this form until the early 1930s. In 1930 it started to disband and the following year it came to an end. The camp was replaced by terraced brick-built cottages consisting of a small kitchen and a slightly bigger main room. This was a marked improvement on their previous accommodation, but it continued to lack modern facilities such as sewers, mains water or electricity.

Rudolf Daniel’s maternal grandfather was Tomáš Malík, who worked as a field watchman in Oslavany for thirty years, which was considered an extraordinary sign of trust for someone from a Romani family. Another prominent figure there was Ludvík Daniel, who worked for over thirty years as a foreman at the West Moravian Power Plant in Oslavany and was one of the first Romanies to make sure his children received an education. He said his eldest son Antonín became a doctor of philosophy and a professor of foreign languages. The second son, Simon, worked as a clerk at the Nosek coal mine in Oslavany. A second cousin, also named Rudolf Daniel, was a virtuoso violinist and music teacher.

Rudolf Daniel started attending school in Oslavany, but in 1918, before the end of the World War I and his father’s return from the front, he and his mother moved to his grandfather’s house at Rousínov. He and another classmate Josef[1] they were the only Romani students at the local higher elementary school. He wanted to continue his studies at secondary school, for which he had the academic qualifications and financial support from his family, but whereas the school gave recommendations to Czech classmates, who were often less able, it discouraged Daniel, telling him he had no hope. He therefore began to learn horse trading from his father.

Horses also influenced his future life in other ways: he courted the daughter of a man who owned a circus, which featured several horses and in which his future wife also performed. She toured with the circus through all the countries and many cities of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and Romania.

[1] Surname not specified.

At the beginning of the war Daniel’s family was living in Hrušovany near Brno. In August 1942, Daniel and his relatives were taken to the camp in Hodonín near Kunštát for three weeks. The first person the new prisoners met there was the camp barber. While the men endured the haircuts quite stoically, the women were frantic and cursed their tormentors, often resisting and getting into fights. Daniel saw with his own eyes a girl who did not eat for days or speak to anyone as a result of such indignities, and she eventually slashed her wrists. They saved her life at the last minute.

The camp consisted of nine huts: five were used to house the prisoners, two were occupied by the Protectorate gendarmes and the camp commander, and the other two were set aside as a kitchen and an office with an infirmary with fifteen beds. Each hut housed up to seven hundred men, women and children, although there was space for about half of that number. At first the families lived together, but after a few months they separated the men from the women and children, so that they were only allowed to see each other in the yard and at workplaces outside the camp. The compound also included the Romani wagons; initially five or six in number, they grew to thirty at one period. The horses were tethered under an outhouse and were used for collecting wood, for bringing rocks from the nearby quarry, or for carrying mail.

The prisoners suffered from lack of food – in the morning they were given unsweetened black water and a thin slice of bread. This was followed at noon by a watery soup and a small amount of dry potatoes or dumplings. Dinner was the same as breakfast, and once or twice a week there was a greasy potato stew, and with the same frequency thirty or forty grams of meat of the poorest quality. Those of the prisoners who worked outside the camp and still had money from home were allowed to buy something extra. And those who worked hard were allowed parcels from home. Those who wanted to, could go to church every Sunday in nearby Černovice or more distant Prosetín. In the course of time an epidemic of typhus broke out in the camp – the contents of the latrines were said to have seeped into the soil and groundwater, and then into the well.

At the Hodonín camp, the inmates worked in the forest gathering firewood. They also built a road – a shorter connection between Hodonín and Rozseč, or quarried stone in a nearby quarry. Women were employed everywhere, including the old and the sick. They worked from six o’clock in the morning until two or three o’clock in the afternoon, sometimes longer. Then the inmates were free until eight o’clock in the evening when there was a roll call and inmates were assigned jobs for the next day.

The camp also had its own self-administration from among the prisoners – the hut chiefs were called sergeants, their deputies were called corporals. ​“Privates” were in charge of individual work parties.

The camp was surrounded by two high wooden fences, and trained dogs ran between them day and night. Although prisoner escapes were frequent, they were not usually successful. The woods around the camp were full of German Protectorate guards, who beat prisoners with whips for various offences, and set dogs on men and women, and Rudolf Daniel remembered the dogs ​“tearing flesh from the pitiful bodies of men and women”. These methods were also used by some of the Czech gendarmes, but they also included officers who never harmed anyone.

In October 1943, Rudolf Daniel was again imprisoned and deported to Auschwitz II-Birkenau, and in April 1944 he was transported to Buchenwald concentration camp as fit for work. However, Rudolf Daniel’s wife did not survive her imprisonment in the camp. He said that however bad the treatment was at the Hodonín camp, it was ​“almost paradise” compared with what awaited them in Auschwitz.