Many of My Friends Died In Fire

Since September 1944, Jaroslav Petr was kept in prison in a Nazi concentration camp in Dessau. He remembers horrible conditions in the camp and prisoners working till exhaustion in Junkers-Werke factory, building military planes for the German army. The war was coming to an end and the Junkers factory and Dessau was one of the major targets of the allied bombing. The biggest attack was on March 7, 1945. The whole town and the concentration camp were razed to the ground. That day Jaroslav Petr was in a camp when tens of incendiary bombs rained down. “Right in front of my bed one of the incendiary pieces exploded and the fire started. The men went to smash down the locked door. Finally they managed. The other group fought the fire with sand. I used the chair to knock out the glass in the window, so we had enough air and did not suffocate because the window had the outer shutters. Through the joints of the shutters we saw the burning town and the camp. The wardens ran away and left us there. Many of my friends died in that fire. We got out and pulled the anchor of the wire netting out of the ground and disposed also the second fence. We slipped under it and saw the Alten quarter in flames,” Petr recalled. He heard someone calling for help. Though it was very dangerous he saved little children from the burning house: “I did not think about anything else but to help them. I went to the house and carried the children out of the bedroom.” On April 12, 1945 all the prisoners who survived had to walk from the destroyed camp to another Nazi concentration camp in Griebo.