Gudrun Wilcke-Pausewang

"My father had a very strong sense of home, now we were back in Mladkov, and my mother noticed that if my father had still studied for two semesters at the Prague university, he could have become a primary school teacher. That would have been ideal for my father. He did not want to do so, he wanted to settle down. First he said, well then I do it. As a young child, about three-year-old, I was in Prague for a semester. But my father had a problem, as he had to learn Czech, as naturally an elementary teacher had to speak at least a little Czech. Has tried to do it, but he probably did not want to learn Czech, because he was incredibly nationalistic. When he noticed that he could not learn Czech, he went back to Mladkov, and back to my mother and I too."

"It was like this: my grandfather, who used to teach at this school, had three German school classes. It was still the Austria-Hungarian monarchy. When I went to school there was already a class of Czechs and two classes of Germans. But in the Czech class, there were many Germans, so the Czechs gave the German children, or all children from their class, a large package of winter fun, and because many Germans were very poor, they had their children sent to this class just to get this package. It was probably all done by the Czech government..."

"And after they were gone, she said, now we cannot stay here anymore, we have to flee. So we fled wildly, not like the Germans who were there later and had to go by train. We did it all on foot and as early as October 1945, we arrived at my mother´s sister's house. And for that very reason, it was like this: the mother escaped with us to the frontier, and there she lived with good friends of my father with us, but only for a week. Then she went with us. This one week she was also once in Mittenwalde, which is a German city, which was formerly also German, and there she saw that there before the Soviet city commander stood a long queue of women. She has also joined the queue and has learned that these women were bombed women who had no home. They wanted to go back to their area. There she glimpsed over and figured that there was a woman also from the West Germany. And with this paper we arrived later, in autumn and October 1945, back to the West Germany. And so I really know, what refugees are. Nine weeks on foot. That must have been about... eight hundred kilometers."