“My husband walked the death march from Auschwitz to Schwarzheide. He was liberated in Varnsdorf. From one thousand prisoners only two hundred remained and he was among them. He was a twenty-year-old-boy.”
“At home we had a horse with a saggy back. One day dad declared in front of one German woman that when Hitler came, he would be riding that horse over Šternberk. She turned him in and in the evening we received a message that we needed to run away, otherwise they would come to arrest our father. At night dad got us into the car and took us to Bohuňovice. They did not know where we went.”
“When we came to Šternberk in 1945., the command had its office right next to us. Dad was going out and they wanted his horse. He did not want to give it to them and so they hit him in his temple with a rifle butt. He then died as a result thereof. He lived for a year or so, but not for too long. He suffered some bleeding. I know that the commander came and he led the soldier who had done it somewhere away. I don’t know what happened with that soldier.”
Věra Buxbaumová, née Konečná, was born on November 11, 1931 in Šternberk. Her parents ran a butcher’s shop in this predominantly German town. Shortly after the takeover of the Sudetenland by the Nazi Germany in October 1938 the family had to leave the town in haste at night. Věra’s father was in danger of being arrested. They were only able to return to the town nearly seven years later. However, in 1949 their butcher’s shop became nationalized by the communists. Věra’s father Jakub Konečný was no longer alive at that time. He had died as a consequence of an injury when he was hit with a rifle butt by a Soviet soldier to whom he refused to surrender his horse. In 1953 Věra married Rudolf Buxbaum, who had been in concentration camps Terezín, Auschwitz and Schwarzheide during the war due to his Jewish origin. He was one of the few who have survived the death march of prisoners. His parents and siblings have survived the war in concentration camps as well, but many of his relatives were murdered by the Nazis. Věra and Rudolf Buxbaum lived together for thirty-one years and they raised sons Jindřich, Pavel and Rudolf. The internment in concentration camps took its toll on her husband’s health and he died in 1984 when he was fifty-nine years old. Věra Buxbaumová was still living in Nová Hradečná in 2018.
