Before the road to hell

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In January 1943, the then 16 year-old Miloš Pick and his family had to board a train that took them to Mladá Boleslav. The local Scout club house served as the place for the registration of Jews before they were dispatched to Theresienstadt. Over 700 of them spent three days in a space that was completely inadequate for their needs. Miloš Pick recalls that they were guarded by the German Gestapo and the Czech gendarmerie: "The gendarmes from Jičín behaved in a very decent way to us. They would pass us the news from the London broadcast. On the contrary, the Gestapo men slapped their way through the overcrowded club house." After three days, they were taken to the train station, loaded into cattle cars and they departed in the direction of Theresienstadt. "The Nazi guards constantly aimed their machine guns at us so we grasped that this would be no rosy walk. We understood that they were taking us to a place from which it was very hard to return," he recalled. Miloš Pick adds that only 21 Jews of those 700 assembled in the club house in Mladá Boleslav survived the war.

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Miloš Pick

Miloš Pick was born in August 16th, 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 he 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 worked 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 the 1948 Miloš Pick had been working in the State Planing Commision. He was expelled from the Communist Party after the soviet invasion in August 1968.

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Mladá Boleslav, the castle

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The castle of Mladá Boleslav was built in the middle of the 13th century at a place, where a Slavic settlement had already been established in the 10th century. In the course of the following centuries, it went through several reconstructions. In the beginning of the 18th century, it was transformed into barracks and the military garrison stayed here until 1940, when it was turned into an internment camp for Jews from the city and the surrounding area. Later, the Jews were transported to Theresienstadt or to other concentration camps. 1043 local Jews were deported in two transports marked as Cl and Cm. Only 48 of them survived the war. Since 1943, the castle was once again used as barracks and since the beginning of the 1950s, it was used as a textile warehouse. The State Archive and Museum of the Mladá Boleslav district is located here since 1972.

On this place

Before the road to hell

Miloš Pick

She concealed her Jewish star with her hand

Eva Machková