Now watch the penultimate testimony clip of this IWalk.
Josef Švehla was born Josef Schwarz in Prague in 1919 and grew up in Maiselova Street.
In elementary school, he received a "B" in conduct for fighting with a classmate who called him a "stinking Jew". Before the war he managed to train as a cook, at the beginning of the Protectorate he worked in the National café, from where he was fired after being denounced that he was Jewish. He then cooked in a Jewish soup kitchen for refugees.
He went to Terezín with the AK transport construction team and worked as a cook in the ghetto. From Terezín he was further deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was selected for slave labour and passed through the camps Blechhammer, Buchenwald, Gleiwitz, Gross Rosen, München-Allach and Schörzingen, and was liberated in Dachau.
He returned home half-dead, together with his friend, the Terezín cook Edgar Krása. He worked as a cook all his life.
The interview was filmed in Brno on 25 January 1996.
Did you manage to spotthe address where Mr. Švehla had to report to the transport? How do you know the address?
Is there anything else about Mr. Švehla's life story that was familiar to you? What?