The Dying Were Doing Better

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A Jewish girl, Herta Coufalová, went through several concentration camps and at the end her miserable journey she arrived, half dead, to the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. The camp was overcrowded and the living conditions were horrible. “There were no gas chambers, but they did not have to be. People were dying like cattle. Zero hygienic conditions. There was no water and only minimum of food. It was worse than any other camp.” Then the typhus epidemic broke out, and Herta got the most serious type of it. Nobody took care of the ill and dying prisoners, and the SS wardens called them for never-ending roll calls. Herta Coufalová was able to get to the gathering place only with help of her friend Alžběta Priová. “Líza and I were deadly friends. She was the one who saved me from death. When I was really sick she pulled me and people in the row were holding me not to fall.” In April 1945 Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British army. The soldiers were giving their own food to the malnourished prisoners. But their bodies could not stand it, and some of them died of the collapse. “We dying were doing better though we could not eat. Those, who were relatively fine and ate some food, if you forgive me, it was their death shit.”

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Herta Coufalová

Herta Coufalová, born Glasnerová, was born in 1926 in a Jewish family in Třebíč. She spent her childhood in a Jewish neighborhood that today is part of the UNESCO world heritage. Her parents were arrested in 1941. In May 1942, some 281 Jews from Třebíč were transported to Theresienstadt. Among them were Herta Coufalová, her brother Harry and her grandma Hermína. Hermína and Harry eventually died in Auschwitz. Herta was deported to Auschwitz in October 1944. She was also in other concentration camps, for instance Kurzbach or Gross Rosen in Silesia. From there, they were evacuated to Bergen Belsen in order to evade the approaching Red Army. On the way there, their railroad transport was almost hit by allied bombs. In the crowded Bergen Belsen camp, the inmates were left without food and water and Herta got sick with typhoid fever. It was a miracle indeed that she was able to survive till the liberation of the camp in April 1945. After the war, she was sent for convalescence to Sweden by the International Red Cross. After she returned to Třebíč, the shop that used to belong to her parents was taken by the so-called "national administrator" (národní správce) and the family property was only returned to her in March 1948. However, the ascendant Communists nationalized the shop in no time and the property has never again been returned to Herta, not even after 1990, in spite of several requests that she had filed. Presently, she lives in Šumperk.

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Bergen-Belsen

Available in: English | Česky

This Nazi concentration camp was located in Lower Saxony, southwest of the city of Bergen. Between the years 1943 - 1945, 100,000 prisoners died here. Upon the liberation of the camp on April 15, 1945, the British Army found 60,000 seriously ill prisoners (nearly 14,000 of them died shortly after the liberation despite treatment) and 13,000 unburied corpses. The concentration camp was burned down with flamethrowers by the military shortly after its liberation for reasons of hygiene.

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The Dying Were Doing Better

Herta Coufalová