Mgr. Petr Pilný

“When I was six, that was early February 1945, my dad was on the last or last-but-one transport to Terezín. I was to go with him but my parents agreed to pretend that they were separated, they got some people they knew, and mum and I went to Malešov near Kutná Hora. There, they taught me that my name was Picka – you see, my name was not Pilný, my name was Pick. Many people who survived the holocaust changed their names to get a different identity. So my name was Picka and my dad was working in the Reich. That’s how I was hiding. There is an institution called the Hidden Child, I went to see them once, but that’s another story.”

“When I was about twenty-five, I was sitting with my dad – my military service was already over – and I told him: ‘Come, let’s take a trip to Terezín together. You can tell me how it was back then.’ We did not talk about it much. So we got our motorcycle and went to Terezín, he would show me around and say: ‘I lived here in these barracks; then they relocated me from the Hannover Barracks to the Dresden Barracks’ or where – I don’t recall. We also came to the infamous blind track where they boarded transports between the houses. My grandma passed through there as did my two aunts and then my brother I talked about, but when my dad was there the transports would not leave – they would arrive from the east. Germans were withdrawing them from the Polish concentration camps as the Red Army progressed. My dad’s task at the time was unloading those lucky and unlucky ones who came back from the eastern camps. Suddenly, he asked me: ‘Remember Pepík Lévy?’ – ‘I do, I would ride his back in Hagibor.’ Dad said: ‘I pulled dead Pepík Lévy from the car here.’”