Mengele looked at me with derision

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In September 1944, Miloš Pick was assigned to the transport leaving Terezín for Auschwitz. It took the transport, made up of cattle wagons, three days and three nights to get to the East. When the wagons reached their destination, Pick and his companions knew that the situation was bad. “On the third day, sometime at four or five a.m., we noticed kilometres of barbed wire and watchtowers with machine guns and searchlights. Then it all started. Even the little we had on us, a backpack, we had to leave behind in the wagon. A so called Kanada Kommando forced us out. They made us line up in a column of fives, SS-men were firing warning shots from their machineguns, they were holding their German shepherds on chain leashes. They made us line up in front of a table with a spotlight, where Mengele was sitting among SS guards.” The transport was about to experience its first selection. At that moment a certain Gert Körbl, who was the leader of Hechaluc - an illegal leftist youth group - in Terezín, played an important role in the life of Miloš Pick. He managed to find out, what was going on: He pushed himself to the front rows of the procession where people had to step forward to face Mengele, and he warned each group of fives: ‘Miloš, everyone under 16 or above 50 goes into the gas chamber, but some transports are already being assigned to work in the arms industry. Report that you’re at least 18 and that you’re a heavy industry worker.’” Pick took this piece of advice seriously: “When it was my turn, I gathered all the strength and energy in me. I tried to look into Mengele’s eyes cheekily and shouted: 'Zwanzig Jahre, Maschinenschlosser!' I was 18 and I was in no way a Maschinenschlosser, and in my pocket, I had my Protectorate identity card saying that I was a student. All I had to do, was reach for it. Mengele looked at me with derision – everyone tried to lie like that – but then he turned away. There was a sparkle of amusement in his eyes and the baton that was about to move to the wrong side stopped suddenly and swung to the other side. SS-men made a gap and I could join the column of fives on the good side. That’s where I felt like vomiting. There, I realized that I was just a few centimetres away from it all going wrong.”

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Miloš Pick

Miloš Pick was born in August 16th in 1926 in a Jewish family in Libáň, where his grandfather and father owned a small factory. After the Nazi occupation he joined local resistance movement. With his friend he printed and distributed leaflets. In January 1943 Hájek was transported to Terezín. He became a member of Communist Party in 1943. In September 1944 was moved to Auschwitz. He managed to escape death in a gas chamber by reporting to Mengele higher age and a locksmith profession during the first selection on the ramp, after he got a warning from his friend Gert Körbel. Later Pick was sent to forced labor in Reich. From November 1944 to April 1945 he had been working in a factory in Meuselwitz-Buchenwald. At the close of the war in April 1945 Hájek escaped with a few friends from a death march back to Bohemia. All Jews transported from Libáň but Miloš Pick and his sister Soňa have perished. Their parents were murdered in Auschwitz. After 1948 Miloš Pick worked in the State Planing Commission. He was expelled from the Communist Party after the soviet invasion in August 1968.

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Auschwitz II-Birkenau

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Construction on the second of the three Auschwitz concentration camps began in October 1941 at the village of Birkenau (Březinka). Hundreds of thousands of prisoners from all over Europe passed through these places. On 7 October 1944, Jewish prisoners of the so-called Sonderkommando revolted – although the uprising was stopped with brutal force, they managed to destroy one of the crematories. Over a million people, mostly of Jewish descent, were killed in the gas chambers of the three Auschwitz concentration camps. In 1947, a museum was established on the premises of the camp in honour of its victims.