Thousands of Ordinary Deaths (Testimony of a Journalist Who Saw the Beginnings and the End, 1933-1945).The unique memoirs of journalist, publicist and Shoah survivor František Kraus. The notes and memoirs are retold, expanded and edited by acclaimed non-fiction writer Roman Cílek. The text focuses on the period 1933-1945, the time of the rise to power of Nazism and its expansion, of which F. Kraus and his family were victims. What is exceptional about this text is the integrity of the memories of a witness who was given the opportunity by fate to be present at the beginning and the end of the tragedy of the Shoah. All this is described through the eyes of a journalist and a witness.
"Witness. A word that seems to have been attributed to František Kraus, who perhaps began to realise that fate had offered him, as a journalist and as a human being, a marvellous and often certainly not joyous opportunity that was not afforded to everyone: to be present at what could be called, with some imprecision, the beginning, and to be present at what was the end. He saw Hitler in the windows of the Berlin Reich Chancellery just after President Hindenburg had made him Reich Chancellor, and he saw the same man triumph in Vienna and Prague a little later, and he saw Runciman at Red Castle, and Henlein in the Sudetenland, and Eichmann at Terezín, and Mengele at Auschwitz. He was forced to be one of the first to build the Terezin ghetto, and a little later to bury Lidice's dead, and still later to approach the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau. He saw what most closely resembles the embodiment of evil. He touched dying friends, he saw thousands of ordinary deaths... he saw indifference and cowardice, but also great acts of humanity: he saw the losers and the winners."
The book is published with the support of the Foundation of the Jewish Community in Prague.
Czech Edition