Václav Berdych

Václav Berdych (born June 12, 1916 in Pottenstein , Austria-Hungary , today the Czech Republic ; † March 3, 2016 ) was a Czech resistance fighter , assistant director and director .

Live and act

Born in the northern Sudetenland , Berdych graduated from high school in 1936 in the small town of Nimburg, not far from his birthplace . He then made contacts with the Czechoslovak film industry and soon found a job as an editor for the local newsreel. During World War II he was due to suspected resistance activity arrested against the Nazi occupying force and on 23 October 1942 as a political prisoner no. 13693 together with the Czech actress Anna Letenská the Mauthausen concentration camp deported . His memories of those years in the concentration camp were the subject of a 247-page book publication by Berdych under the simple title Mauthausen (subtitle: k historii odboje vězňů v koncentračním táboře Mauthausen ). There he also reported on the intention of the National Socialists to rebuild them in Mauthausen in 1945 after the destruction of the crematoria in Auschwitz - Heinrich Himmler's order effective November 28, 1944. Berdych had received this information from some of the concentration camp inmates employed in the Mauthausen construction office.

After the liberation , Václav Berdych returned to Czechoslovakia . There he worked until 1964 as an assistant director for domestic films. It was only in 1950 that he was entrusted with directing the film Es war im Mai (Bylo to v máji) alongside Mac Fric .

In 2008, the almost 92-year-old contemporary witness Berdych gave information about the deportation of Letenská, who was murdered in Mauthausen shortly after their arrival, in the German documentary Andula - A Visit from Another Life , also known as Game for Life .

literature

• Kay Less : Between the stage and the barracks. Lexicon of persecuted theater, film and music artists from 1933 to 1945 . With a foreword by Paul Spiegel . Metropol, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-938690-10-9 , p. 382.

Web links

• Václav Berdych in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ zatrojku.cz ( Memento of the original from July 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.