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from Part I - Camp Life: The Reality 1933–1945
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2018
František Kadlec was born in Prague in 1911. Kadlec was arrested in May 1940 for his membership in a left-leaning nationalist workers’ youth organization that had been banned on March 15, 1939. He was first held in a Prague prison, then sent to Terezín concentration camp, finally arriving at Dachau on October 18, 1940 (prisoner number 20,601). After being liberated there in 1945, Kadlec returned to his birthplace, Prague, where he worked as an architect. He died there in 2003.
In 1992, František Kadlec returned to Dachau concentration camp for the first time to participate in the ceremony of commemoration on the anniversary of the liberation. He described the circumstances under which he created the poems included here, during his captivity in Dachau:
I am a sensitive person … and it was with this frame of mind that I arrived in Dachau concentration camp … in this hellish, seemingly unreal world … in this anus mundi … I was in the same position as someone who has fallen into a bog and is forced to try to get his feet on solid ground to keep his head above water. I surmised that every move, every attempt to rest and recover meant certain death. All around me there were thousands of people in the same situation, and yet I was all alone among this sea of people.
Nevertheless—I do not know how—I did find a friend there, or he found me … other friends, previously strangers, followed … these people and I thought in the same way. I ceased to be lonely in the sea of people; these friends helped me, especially by making me part of a “work kommando” [i.e., work detail]…. I started on the “plantations” [i.e., the herb gardens], later I shifted potato sacks in another kommando, then moved to another work group yet again, wielding pickaxes and pouring cement, … and finally ended up in the “working unit” of the SS-Wirtschaftsbetriebe [i.e., SS-economic concerns]…. Here I endured dysentery and found writing materials and a place to hide all that I had written.
Finally, I saw a way of giving testimony to those who were going to succeed us, testimony about what I had seen and suffered through, all through the most powerful medium available, the medium of poetry.
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