Jean Samuel, aka André Ratier, was arrested by the Gestapo on May 18, 1944, around noon, in his office, in Paris. The Germans burst into the office, guns in their hands, screaming "German police, hands up". A member of the network manages to escape but the end result is dramatic: one dead, one injured and the network destroyed.
Image: archive kz gedenkstätte Dachau
Stanislav Zámečník was born on November 12, 1922 in the Moravian village of Nivnice (Czechoslovakia). His father was a janitor in a school where his mother was a housekeeper. After the end of compulsory schooling, he becomes an apprentice pastry chef. On March 16, 1939, when he was 17 years old and the Nazi troops occupied his native Moravia, he was a member of the resistance group against the occupier. Arrested by the Wehrmacht at the end of 1939, he was imprisoned in several prisons, escaped and tried to leave his country, but was caught, taken back and deported by the Viena (Austria) Gestapo to Dachau where he arrived on 22 February 1941 (registration number 23947).
His story told by Sydney Weith
at the KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau,
April 27- 2018
After that imprisonment.
Born in Vienna, May 4, 1914, as the son of a working-class family.
My father spent his childhood together with his three siblings in Vienna. He was a trained bookbinder and when I remember him it is always reading.
As a young man he was already engaged politically and after the events of February 1934 he dedicated himself to the rights of the working people.
The same year because of his active engagement against the increasing fascism in Austria, he was imprisoned in Wöllersdorf.
Yurij Piskunov was born as one of three children on 22 December 1925 in Zaporozhye, Ukraine. His father died when he was eight years old, his mother had to feed the family working in a locomotive repair work shop. Prior to the war Jurij had been able to attend a technical school for just one year. That was the time his political convictions started to grow in him. Although he never became a member of the Communist Party, he was always a committed communist and has remained so to this day. He calls himself a "communist in the heart".
André Delpech was born on the 1st of October 1924 at Origny-Sainte-Benoite in the North of France. His father was a Stationmaster and his mother was a primary school teacher.
After the declaration of war in 1939, Andre's father was ordered to close the station. With the 1940 armistice, his family decided to return to their ancestral land in the South West of France, in the Lot region, which was at this time in the French "free zone".
We exited Begunje prisons. It was 1942. 30th May, on the day before the transport they gathered 23 of us in offices, ordered us to pack our personal things, that we had to put in special bags when we arrived in Begunje, and write our family's address on the packages. We were allowed to keep only a toothbrush and a soap. In time, based on what they could keep when leaving, prisoners would know pretty accurately their destiny. So to the killing zone... Not to Draga, but to the unknown in the Third Reich, where we will be secretly killed, without our family ever to find out where our final home lies.
The Dachau administration recorded an intake of 206206 prisoners.
Many of them are now forgotten.
