People pushed into gas chambers were singing the national anthem

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Marta Kottová was transferred to Auschwitz from Terezín. “I lost track of time, given all the things that were going on. I don’t know if I spent a week, or two months in there. It was a terrible shock for those of us who came from Terezín. I just remember the smoke and the horror and that I didn’t want to admit to myself that the smoke was in fact my mother and father. I remember the roll calls at the Apelplatz, the naked people and the piles of cadavers.” On March 7th 1944, on the day of President Masaryk’s birth, the greatest execution of Czech Jews during the Second World War took place in Auschwitz. Almost four thousand people went to the gas chambers. “These people had lived in Auschwitz for six months, so they knew where they were heading. In front of the gas chamber they sang the Czechoslovak national anthem. At the time the local Sonderkommando which was supposed to push them into the gas chamber refused to do its job. The SS-men were completely taken aback by that, so they started to shoot and pushed everyone into the gas chamber including the Sonderkommando.”

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Marta Kottová

was born February 22nd 1929 in Černovice u Tábora to Robert and Gabriela Lašová. Her brother Viktor was six years older. They lived in Černovice until Marta was three, then the family moved to Prague. Since she was five, Marta was an avid scout and Sokol member, and as she says, she has had a happy childhood. With love she remembers the First Republic era and President Masaryk. After the rise of Nazism, the persecution began, which Marta experienced most poignantly when she was forced to surrender her dog. Then there came the transports to Terezín. On December 1st, 1941, her brother Viktor boarded transport AK2, and half a year later, Marta and her parents followed in transport AAR. At first Marta stayed together with her mother in the Hamburg barracks, but then she was moved to a so-called children's house L410. The worst was however yet to come. On October 6th, 1944 they arrived to Auschwitz, where both Marta's parents eventually died. Before Christmas of the same year Marta got to Mährensdorf via Gross-Rosen, where she worked in a flax-processing factory and also performed jobs like opening frozen wagons with a pickaxe. After the liberation in May 1945 and her adventurous return to Prague, she was reunited with her brother Viktor under very emotional circumstances. He has miraculously survived the Nazi horrors, even though he was one of those, who were sent from Terezín to bury the men of Lidice, and thus he was to have been exterminated afterwards. Today, Marta enjoys an abundant life, she is a great-grandmother, and she visits schools, telling children about her experiences, she is also the head of the Historic Group Auschwitz. On October 28th, 2008, the President decorated her with the State Medal for Merit in the field of education.

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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.