Otto Taussig

* 1926

  • “Another terrible experience, which I can still see happening before my eyes today. There was a camp of female Poles next to us, and behind their camp there was something like a hill, except those were ammunition depots. During one of the air raids those girls ran out on to the meadow and they got the first hits. And me and the friends that I served with, we then had to load up the heads, arms, and take them to the local morgue.”

  • “The people who lived in the house were called Sonnenschein, and their son was chosen for the same transport as I was. And his parents asked my Dad for me to take care of him. He was a year younger than me, but he was kind immature still. I must say that I was a bit more weathered, one thing was that I did sports - I would go play football in Hagibor, I took classes. Whereas he, seeing as he couldn’t go to school, he didn’t do anything. And we kept together and in the end they took us to Germany together, we escaped together and got all the way to Prague. And we were friends our whole life, before he came down with palsy and died. We stayed friends even after each of us married, simply, it was a friendship for life.”

  • “And in Toužim we walked in the night, and I was cold because I only had a shirt and clogs. And the food, we begged for it three or four times at some lonely houses, when we saw that the house stood all alone. We watched for a long time to see if there was a bloke in the house, or only a woman. And when there was only a woman, we went to beg. They gave us bread, potatoes, so we ate something at least, but not much. And when we were in Toužim, we slept in one hayloft. It was part of a house, it served as a barn, and there was hay in that part. In the morning we heard three or four blokes saying that Hitler had copped it. So we climbed out, but the blokes told us that it’s not over yet, that we should better hide back inside the hayloft, that someone would come to get us in the night. And really, a bloke came for us in the night and took us to Pilsen.”

  • “All I remember is that [the SA members] went wild there. They broke all of our windows, and we couldn’t even close the front door when they left, and they arrested my father and took him to Sachsenhausen.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 11.02.2014

    (audio)
    délka: 01:25:06
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Memory of nations (in co-production with Czech television)
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I didn’t really believe I would survive

Otto Taussig was born in 1926 into a Jewish family in Ústí nad Labem. His father taught at the local grammar school. The family first decided to stay in the border region even after the Munich Agreement was signed, but when they were attacked during Kristallnacht, they moved to Prague. In December 1941 the Taussigs were transported to Terezín. They remained together there until autumn 1944, when Otto Taussig was taken by transport to Auschwitz. Luckily, he only stayed one month in the extermination camp, and in October 1944 he left with a labour commando to Meuselwitz, where he worked in the local munitions factory. In the last weeks of the war he was evacuated by train across the Czechoslovak border region. The witness was able to make use of the confusion caused by an Allied attack on the German train, and together with a friend he escaped. They managed to get to Prague, where they experienced the Prague Revolt. In the first years after the war the witness was mainly tasked by ensuring himself a living and by searching for surviving relatives. He was even embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute over the family villa of his parents. In the early 1950 Otto Taussig was arrested by State Security in connection with the illegal absconding of his neighbour. His wife was also interrogated, causing her lifelong mental troubles. The witness now lives in the Home for Social Care Hagibor in Prague.