Vladimir Feierabend

On July 1 1942 the Gestapo arrests the 17-year-old high school student Vladimir Feierabend in Prague. Together with his family, he is detained in “kin imprisonment” because his uncle Ladislav Feierabend is a member of the Czechoslovakian exile government. The exile government had organized the fatal assassination of the high-ranking Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich in May 1942. Vladimir Feierabend is transported to the Dachau concentration camp via the Theresienstadt small fortress prison. In the Dachau camp he works as a clerk for the Political Department of the Gestapo. This assignment to the administration work detail enables him to survive. He is spared both extremely hard physical work and transfer to other concentration camps. On April 29 1945 Vladimir Feierabend is liberated by U.S. Army troops. All members of the Feierabend family survive their concentration camp imprisonment; the grandfather of Vladimir Feierabend dies shortly after however from the effects of his imprisonment. Vladimir Feierabend completes his high school education and studies medicine. During the communist era in Czechoslovakia the Feierabend family is again politically persecuted and banished from Prague in 1952. Vladimir Feierabend is forced to work in a mine. In the mid-1960s the family is permitted to return to Prague, where Vladimir Feierabend works as a doctor. Since 1990 he is chair of the national delegation of the former Czech prisoners in the Comité International de Dachau and is active as a contemporary witness.