“They were transporting us in a cattle train for three weeks in terrible conditions! In prison there were forty of us sleeping in one room. We were even sleeping on the floor. The windows were built-in, there was only a small opening for ventilation up there. For food, they were giving us green tomatoes and a sloppy soup.”
Women in gulag pressed the commander to be transferred to another camp
“There were 630 of those camps there and ours was the last one, and we had to build it by ourselves, The building, and everything... So we went on a hunger strike. We did not eat for three days and we wanted to speak to the ´načálnik´ (commander) of those camps. We did not want to eat, so this ´načálnik´ eventually came, after a long time. ´You got to eat, you go to eat,´ everybody was telling us. And we argued that we wanted to be sent to the seventh camp, we wanted to be moved there. He says: ´And who told you that?!´ We did not want to betray the warden, because the wardens watched there and we were forbidden to speak to them, so we did not turn him in. We said we knew it, but we did not tell him from whom. ´All right, begin eating then, we will transfer you to that seventh camp.´ In about three weeks they really transferred us and in that seventh camp prisoners were working on manufacturing wooden beads and bags, and so on, for England.”
- born April 7th 1922 in Carpathian Rruthenia
- emigrated in 1939, arrested in the Soviet Union and then interned in labour camps and prisons
- 1943 joined the Svoboda´s army
- nurse on the eastern front
- after the war lived with her husband Fedor in northern Bohemia, mostly in Teplice