Exploring traces of Jewish Olomouc

The first deportation to Poland

Pesach's son Heinrich Scheck, called Heini, Jindřich or by his Hebrew name Josef Chaim, was arrested by the Gestapo in Brno in the autumn of 1939. After a short imprisonment at Špilberk, he was deported to the camp in Nisko on 23 October 1939, in the first ever deportation transport.

On 2 November, German camp guards drove some of the prisoners towards the eastern part of Poland, occupied by the Soviet Union. By shooting, the prisoners were forced to cross the border river; on the other side they were immediately arrested by Soviet soldiers. Heini was arrested and taken to a prison in the town of Sinjava, after his release he settled among thousands of Czechoslovak refugees in Lviv.

A trained furrier, he earned his living as a blacksmith in a Soviet enterprise called Derzhsortfond. A love letter from home, seized during his subsequent arrest, was preserved in a file kept on him by the Soviet secret police.


How is this love letter different from the love letters people write to each other today?

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