In those days it was as if everyone had come down with a fever. World War I had left behind ten million dead and 20 million wounded, and until recently it seemed unthinkable that the Germans would ...want to provoke a conflict of such proportions again. Mud, typhus and rats in the trenches at Ypres, mustard gas penetrating uniforms and slowly corroding lungs, the blood-soaked fields of Flanders, the heroic but desperate battle of Czechoslovak units at Sochi and Piava… these were all still fresh in the collective memory. But humiliation, the sense of superiority, and anger would once more
Death March Kundra, Ondřej
Vendulka,
03/2021
Book Chapter
The death march was one of the methods of murder perfected by the Nazis. The primary aim of the death marches was to clear the concentration, labour and prisoner-of-war camps as the German troops ...retreated. In spite of increasing defeats, the Nazis were unwilling to abandon their delusional ideas about racial purity and a “final solution to the Jewish problem”, so the death marches were used for the targeted murder of prisoners, who were made to march for weeks without food, water or rest. Those who collapsed from exhaustion were shot in the back of the neck. Anyone who tried
Vendulka’s birth on 27 December 1930 filled her parents with a sense of enormous gratification, as they had had been trying for a child for many years. Šimon was forty and Karla twenty-seven. They ...gave their only child the names Hana Vendula. Up to the end of the war she herself only used her first name; she became Vendulka after the war when she wanted to start a new life and forget about the bad things in her past.
Both parents were from Jewish families, but tended to live their faith informally. They attended the synagogue irregularly but kept up
Christianstadt Kundra, Ondřej
Vendulka,
03/2021
Book Chapter
For the journey from Auschwitz they were given a piece of bread and a little piece of margarine. It was summer and humid, and in the unventilated cattle truck the fat soon melted and became a smelly, ...greasy liquid. Vendulka had already learned never to eat food all at once, because it would be a long time before they would get any more. So she just nibbled the bread. It took a whole day for the train to reach Christianstadt, a subcamp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in Western Poland. As soon as Vendulka and Karla climbed down from the
Jan Lukas was naturally familiar with František Drtikol’s experiments with light, and also with his nude photographs, in which the curved shapes of the female body were transformed into sea waves. He ...also knew of Josef Sudek’s poetical photographic studies and the avantgarde photographic works of Jaromír Funke. But their photographs did not really reflect real life and the real world that was changing so fast and radically at the beginning of the 20th century. Jan Lukas was attracted by something else: the present, people in the natural surroundings of their everyday lives.
In a rare interview in 1988 that
The news that Jan Lukas received from Vendulka and her parents was vague because of Nazi censorship. He sent them several letters and parcels to Terezín, but received only terse replies, saying they ...were well looked after, they had enough food, and a roof over their heads… He had his doubts about whether this was true, but at least he could be sure they were still alive. In autumn 1944 he opened at breakfast a letter postmarked Christianstadt, Germany. Karla and Vendulka wrote to him that they had left Auschwitz and had been sent on a transport to a labour
Back Home Kundra, Ondřej
Vendulka,
03/2021
Book Chapter
“The Prague we returned to was a completely different city from the one we had left two years before. I don’t know what I imagined,” Vendulka said as she raised her eyes to me. The tea I was holding ...in my hand had long gone cold, and I had scarcely taken a sip from it.
“You see most of my relatives and friends had ended up in concentration camps and we had no idea where to go. My mother, who had been extremely courageous the whole time, suddenly became frightened that someone would recognise us and report us. Or we’d
“It was easy to recognise a Communist: he scowls when others are rejoicing,” Jan Lukas wrote about one of the photos he took at the Sokol gymnastics festival that took place from 19 to 27 July 1948. ...It was several months after the Communist takeover of power, and the gymnastics rally in Prague turned into a mass protest against the emerging dictatorship. It was the last free protest for many years.
On Lukas’s photograph thousands of people in the streets wave small Czech and American flags and carry portraits of Masaryk and Beneš, despite the fact that the latter had
The society magazines that Jan Lukas had contributed to for many years were abolished. They had propagated a decadent, bourgeois lifestyle that was incompatible with the needs and aims of the working ...proletariat. Lukas’s photographs suddenly teemed with five-pointed stars, posters of political bosses, Uncle Joe Stalin with his moustache, women milking cows or driving tractors. Communist iconography was inescapable. It adorned the façades of hotels, tramcars, streets and cowsheds. Lukas commented on it ironically as was his wont. He had no other option anyway.
“It was the start of a time of mammoth plans. (…) But the posters with
Auschwitz Kundra, Ondřej
Vendulka,
03/2021
Book Chapter
This time they were cattle trucks. A hundred prisoners were squeezed into each of them. They could each take a small piece of luggage, and before the soldiers slammed the doors behind them, they ...placed a bucket of water inside along with several loaves of bread. It was dark in the wagon, and there was so little room that it was almost impossible to lie down. The prisoners relieved themselves in a chamber pot that was handed round and then emptied out of the barred window. Vendulka couldn’t tell how long they were travelling. Time ceased to exist for her.
