AntonínKalina

"I met my father and my brother Zoltán in the crowd. I was happy I wasn't alone. I survived the march thanks to that. We reached Buchenwald, where my father and Zoltán fell ill. First my brother died and later also my father. The camp was liberated in three days."

"I remember the American soldiers, the horror in their faces. I'll never forget that black sergeant. A muscular giant full of humanity, shedding tears of helpless rage, tears of shame ..."

"I lost my whole family during the war. My parents, my grandparents, my brother, my aunts, my uncles. Twenty-nine of us left for Auschwitz. Only three of us returned."

"An absolutely incomprehensible and incidental miracle came to me then. A  completely unknown person appeared in the doorway and shouted loudly in Czech: Are there any more Czech boys here?"

"We only wanted one thing, and that was food. Food was the most important thing for us. You eat everything you can bite and swallow. Without knowing what. Even something which is not cooked. Raw potatoes were an unattainable dream for us."

"In my writing, the Holocaust can never be mentioned in the past tense. In the Holocaust, I recognized a certain state of man, the final station of a great adventure reached by a European man with his two thousand years of ethical and moral culture built behind his back."

"I was desperate. While I was experiencing the first hours and days of freedom, Peter was suffering in open wagons, completely without food, cross-country through Germany. It was not until May 9 that he got to Terezín. And there he was freed. Only three prisoners survived from his carriage."

"So I made the biggest career of my life: I became a Blockschreiber (block clerk or registrar) working for Toník Kalina."