Eduard Daniel

In March 1943, all the Romani peo­ple were sum­moned to the Osla­vany gen­darme sta­tion. While they were being reg­is­tered and fin­ger­print­ed, Eduard Daniel noticed that the list was marked ​“Auschwitz”.

Daniel’s fam­i­ly lived in a set­tle­ment in Osla­vany, which had about sev­en­ty inhab­i­tants. Some of them were tak­en to the camp in Hodonín near Kunštát as ear­ly as August 1942, from where they were released again thanks to bribes. This was also the case of Eduard Daniel. But they did not enjoy their free­dom for long, as he said. 

Less than a year lat­er, in March 1943, the gen­darmes deport­ed most of the Romani inhab­i­tants to Brno, where they were con­fined in the sta­bles of the town’s slaugh­ter­house. Only the chil­dren of Daniel’s aunt Amalia remained at home in Osla­vany – Antonín, Anděla, Anna, Růže­na and Vlasta.

At the recep­tion cen­tre, they were herd­ed into a build­ing full of manure and dirty straw, like pigs, he said, and they stayed there until a list was drawn up for a trans­port. A Ger­man police offi­cer, [Franz] Herzig, came there every day and decid­ed who would be put on the trans­port based on racial char­ac­ter­is­tics. Daniel said that almost every­one was on it. Among those released was Anna Danielová from Osla­vany, a Czech woman who returned to her native Zbýšov with her chil­dren, but her hus­band Cyril Daniel was tak­en away. Daniel’s moth­er’s cousin, Jan Daniel, also had a Czech woman named Lišková as his part­ner, but she was includ­ed in the trans­port with her daugh­ter and son.

At the Brno slaugh­ter­house, some of the Czechs did not behave well and took advan­tage of the sit­u­a­tion, such as the Pro­tec­torate police­man [Arnošt] Dubový, who took bribes even though he knew he could not arrange for the per­sons in ques­tion to be removed from the trans­port. Daniel saw with his own eyes how he took mon­ey from an old man of about sev­en­ty who begged him to inter­cede — Dubový took the ban­knotes from him, say­ing that he had already spo­ken to the per­son in charge, but at the same time he and Herzig were talk­ing about some­thing com­plete­ly different.

Before the depar­ture, men, women, old peo­ple and small chil­dren were herd­ed into freight wag­ons, indis­crim­i­nate­ly, and the doors were bolt­ed and the train left. They had no water or feed or even a buck­et as a latrine. They arrived at Auschwitz at night­fall, but the train stopped before the pub­lic rail­way sta­tion the fields, where trucks were wait­ing to take the detained Roma to the con­cen­tra­tion camp. Daniel and many oth­ers, not only from Osla­vany, did not under­stand Ger­man, so when the SS broke down the doors of the cars and shout­ed Ger­man com­mands, most of the Roma were left stand­ing help­less­ly inside. The SS and their dogs there­fore drove them out onto the wait­ing trucks with rifle butts. Daniel helped his sev­en­ty-sev­en-year-old grand­moth­er Tere­sa, who was car­ry­ing a bun­dle of blan­kets, to get off; he held his aunt Leopold’s four-year-old son around the neck and urged the oth­er, aged thir­teen, to grab his trousers as he came down. In that way they man­aged to keep togeth­er and get on the same truck togeth­er. On arrival at the camp they were herd­ed into the recep­tion bar­racks. They had some food with them from home, but oth­er­wise the sit­u­a­tion in the place where they found them­selves was cat­a­stroph­ic, he said. Peo­ple had nowhere to lie down, and from every­where came the shouts of chil­dren and the fright­ened wail of adults.