Leon Růžička

Leon Růžič­ka was the ninth child born into the fam­i­ly of Alois Růžič­ka, a Romani boil­er­mak­er set­tled in Lom u Most. Leon was six years old when Alois Růžič­ka died. He said he want­ed to go to school like his white friends, but they did­n’t want ​“gyp­sies” any­where, so he was already work­ing at that age, often doing hard work.

When the Ger­mans occu­pied the Czech bor­der­lands in 1938, fif­teen-year-old Leon moved with his moth­er Anna Růžičková and old­er broth­er Fran­ta to Klad­no, where he and his broth­er worked at the blast fur­naces in the Pol­di steel­works. The old­er sib­lings already had their own fam­i­lies and lived with them most­ly in Peruc and Slavětín.

Leon Růžič­ka recalled the year 1941 [actu­al­ly 1943 (ed.)]: when he and his broth­er were going to work ear­ly in the morn­ing on 6 March, the Gestapo arrived and took them and their moth­er in police van to the Gestapo sta­tion. He then met his broth­er and moth­er only dur­ing joint inter­ro­ga­tion, oth­er­wise they were sep­a­rat­ed. He recalled being bru­tal­ly beat­en dur­ing the inter­ro­ga­tions and also men­tioned the head of the Klad­no Gestapo, [Har­ald] Wies­mann, and how bru­tal­ly he ruled his ​“slaves”. Leon Růžič­ka was con­vict­ed and deport­ed to [the con­cen­tra­tion camp at] Auschwitz. [1] In the trans­port he met the fam­i­lies of his sib­lings, 28 in total includ­ing him. Thir­teen of them were chil­dren; only his moth­er was missing.

Upon arrival at the camp, SS offi­cers with dogs were wait­ing for them and the com­man­der[2] gave the order to line up in threes. Not every­one under­stood Ger­man, so the SS beat some of the pris­on­ers. After about half an hour they reached the gate of Auschwitz II-Birke­nau, where the SS offi­cers began to sep­a­rate the chil­dren from their moth­ers. The moth­ers, of course, resist­ed. Leon’s sis­ter, Fan­da, also argued with an SS offi­cer about her chil­dren, and she pushed the SS offi­cer. He shot her, and one of the chil­dren with her<u>.</u>

In the camp, they were tak­en to a build­ing where they had to strip naked and then had their hair cut off. One by one they went into cold water show­ers, first the chil­dren, then the women and final­ly the men, then they were giv­en camp clothes and tat­tooed with prison num­bers on their left fore­arms. This went on all night, until 4:30 in the morn­ing, but by 5 o’clock it was morn­ing roll call. They were hun­gry and very thirsty, but right after the roll call each Oberkapo took one to two hun­dred peo­ple to work.

Pris­on­ers were beat­en with rub­ber and steel trun­cheons while work­ing; some died or had to be tak­en to the infir­mary. At noon they had a half-hour break for lunch, which, accord­ing to Růžič­ka, even pigs would not eat; then they worked until 6:00 p.m. At 7:00 p.m. there was a roll call (usu­al­ly two hours long) and only after­wards on the block did they get a piti­ful din­ner: net­tle tea and one loaf of bread between eight men.

Leon Růžič­ka spent a year and a half in Auschwitz, after which he was trans­ferred to [the con­cen­tra­tion camp at] Buchen­wald, where he worked in a stone quar­ry for sev­en months. He was then moved to the Dora camp, where they were build­ing an under­ground fac­to­ry in the rock, but it was over­crowd­ed. There­fore he was trans­ferred first to Harzun­gen, from which the pris­on­ers com­mut­ed by freight train to work in the Dora camp, and then to Ell­rich. In Feb­ru­ary 1945 he was trans­ferred to Bergen[-Belsen], where he lived to see the end of the war.[3]

[1] Leon Růžič­ka gave the date of the trans­port as 10 March 1941, in fact it was 11 March 1943. (ed.)

[2] Name not given.

[3] The camp was lib­er­at­ed by British sol­diers on 15 April 1945. (ed.)

After the war, Leon Růžič­ka returned to his home­land, but he looked for his loved ones in vain. His moth­er and all his sib­lings and their fam­i­lies, includ­ing the chil­dren, per­ished in the gas cham­bers or died as a result of abuse.