April 20, 1945
On April 20, 1945, Otto Wolf was killed.
Let’s backtrack for a moment about this event. First off, Otto was Jewish. Otto was in hiding from the Nazis. Otto’s fate would have been different had the Russian troops that were on the German’s side, discovered this seventeen year old boy, who would have done great things.
Otto was born on June 5, 1927 in Mohlenice, Moravia, Czech Republic.
He was the youngest of three children.
Otto’s end came very suddenly.
As his sister, Felicitas (the only sibling to survive) wrote in Otto’s diary:
“At 6 A.M., they [the Vlasov troops] ask us all for personal identification. They confront our Otošek [diminutive for Otto] first. He is at a loss for words, and finally says that he is visiting the Oheras and that he is from Telč. The Vlasovite commander does not believe him, though, and simply says: “You’re coming with me.” Otto rises to his feet resolutely and goes, although his face is as white as paper. The rest of us feel like knives are being driven into our hearts. They demand identification from Papa, too, but he says that he has special dispensation and besides is sixty-one already, so finally they leave him alone. “They don’t even bother Mommy and me. […] After a search, they line up all their prisoners. There are about fifteen of them, including Mr. Ohera, our Otošek, Michlík, Hodulík, the two Závodník boys, and some others we don’t know. Papa is the last to glimpse them as the Vlasovites lead them, double file, toward Újezd where they have their headquarters. We are all half-dead with anxiety about what will happen next. […] Papa decides that whatever happens, we cannot afford to stay here and must go off to the forest, though unfortunately without our beloved Otošek. We take nothing with us except a piece of bread and some shmaltz. […] We are all so crushed by events that none of us has eaten anything since yesterday, and we all feel emotionally exhausted. Each of us tries to hide sadness, pain, and tears from the others. Papa laments and weeps terribly, and we have our hands full keeping him calm. Just before I returned from the Oheras’ in the afternoon, he had gone off to cut some branches so we have something to lie on in our hideout: a job that used to be Otík’s [diminutive for Otto]. “It made him so sad that he had to return to Mommy. He was so weak that he could not talk or even breathe. Mommy immediately gave him some medicine to calm him down. The weather is changeable and somewhat cold. We go to sleep at seven without having eaten anything.”
Otto’s very nature was to protect the family. He didn’t care if he was going to give up his life for them, but that’s what he did.
Otto’s gift to his sister was life. He was only seventeen when he died ( though people say he was 18. He would have been 18 that June, had he survived).
Otto was tortured by the Germans and the Russians, because they thought he was a partisan, which he was not.
Otto’s body was so badly hurt from all the torture, but he still did not reveal his name, his family’s or those who helped hide them, saving them all.
On Friday, April 20, 1945, the end came for Otto and eighteen other young men, ages from fifteen to fifty, were taken to the Kyjanice forest. They were put in a truck, all of them could barely walk, they were in so much pain, and they were all lined up, with a big grave dug. This is where it gets a little interesting. Two sources, including Salvaged Pages, said that Otto was shot and then burned. When I looked up this theory, I found a news article on the death of Otto, it said he was shot in the head and then burned in a tiny little hut with the other men. But the account by Zdenka Calabkova, she said this:
“They took the men to Velký Újezd, where they interrogated and tortured them for two days. Local people later told us what happened there. Then they put them in a lorry with petrol and took them to Kyjanice. There was a wooden cabin with a ground floor about two to three meters. It was a storage place for equipment. They threw them in, sprayed everything with petrol and set the cabin on fire. That was how our poor men had ended. The place was guarded until the end of the war when the Russians came. Nobody could come near. They even brought a German priest to consecrate it. And when he saw the atrocities he broke down and wasn’t able to do anything. Poor guys, none of them had his legs unhurt.” With this, it is still shown that Otto was burnt. But, in another article I have found, it also states that Otto was shot and then burned. Either way, he was dead and then burnt. There were other men rounded up, but those men were from Trsice and they were let go. Sadly, the men from Zakrov were not.
The way Otto acted in this situation was none other than heroic and I believe that Felicitas never realized what a gift he gave her. He loved her so much that he laid his life down for her. I’m sure he was thinking of Felicitas, his mom and his dad when he was being beaten. He had no political affiliation, and the enemy thought it would be fun to torture an innocent seventeen year-old boy. This is not how we think of Jews dying. We think of them being gassed, or just being starved to death. But, there were instances like Otto, where they were in situations that were not in camps or ghettos.
But on this day, Otto has been gone for almost seventy-seven years.
Today, you should remember him, look him up and remember that this boy died for really no reason at all, other than because he was Jewish and he was thought to be a partisan.
