Gottfried Bach

“Yes, it was pretty hard. For instance, she worked for farmers. One of our neighbours had a field right on the border, and she worked it. Suddenly – I’m sorry, Mum always cried at this bit – she saw her own cows on the field. And it was terrible. She got over it in the end, but it was hard for her.”

“Yes, it was an expulsion. I know most of it from hearsay, but I have memories of my own. I know how we stood there. My brother was three years younger, so he was two, and he was in the pushchair. My sister was two years older than me, and we just rode along with the pushchair. We had nothing else. Just a few things in the pushchair. Mum told us there were bankbooks there, which they confiscated later on. I also remember the column, trudging on towards Heinrichsreith, or into Heinrichsreith itself, with its well-known bridge, which is a bit run-down now - apparently they’ve deliberately avoided repairing it. They don’t want cars crossing it, but you can still walk there. And that’s where the stream of people passed through. I have my own memories of that, it took a long time, and it was hot. And one old man, I’m not sure if I remember that myself, at least Mum used to tell it this way, he was about eighty years old, and he had ‘open feet’, a skin disease. He sat in a ditch and yelled at them to just bury him there and be done with it, that he couldn’t go any further.”