Escaping the transport to Auschwitz

“So we got to Theressienstadt and here’s what I remember from that place: I had two severe nervous breakdowns there that as a psychiatrist I would call total panic and a psychotic disorder. We should have gone on the transport to Auschwitz several times, that was a public secret, but my mom injected petrol underneath our skin which made us feverish. That prevented us from going on the transport as the Germans probably prided themselves on sending healthy people for work in the camps. The argument was that they didn’t want people with fever to go to a concentration camp. So I probably went through encephalitis or meningoencephalitis and brain inflammation several times as a result of these fevers.”

• Born in 1933 in Pilsen.
• Comes from an atheist Jewish bourgeois family.
• His father was arrested in 1939 and later died in a concentration camp
• Deported to Theressienstadt together with his mother and brother in 1942.
• Suffered two serious nervous strikes in Theressienstadt.
• Liberated in 1945, suffered from a post traumatic syndrome for several years.
• An active member of the KAN in the sixties.
• The secret state police was trying to win him over as a collaborator in the seventies.
• Works as a psychotherapist in the area of addiction treatment.
• Takes an active stand against Neo Nazism.