Emil Baierl

Then the army came and they were the most dangerous. They shouted “Halt!” and if you didn’t, they’d start firing. That winter they shot two girls close by us. They lay on the meadow, one was shot clean through her head, dying immediately, the other was shot in the belly and screamed for hours later. They weren’t far away, at most five hundred metres. We weren’t allowed to go out there, that was completely forbidden. By the evening they were both dead and then they took them by sledge to the morgue in Červené Dřevo. That’s where I saw them, because as altar boys we had to help out there. That’s where we looked at those dead bodies. All the other men who were shot also ended up in Červené Dřevo. One from Vorderbuchberg in Bavaria, one from Liščí and one from Chudenín, all three ended up at the morgue in Červené Dřevo. It’s quite an odd thing to see, when you’re a small boy…

And when we had our wits about us, we were looking to get out. Bit by bit we carried things out, that winter of 1945. Our uncle helped us. We put our furniture, beds and kitchen cabinet on sledges and dragged them along the road between Fleky and Hofberg. It was something of a mass migration, the roads were full of people. Until the army came, things went well. When the army came, that was it. They wanted nothing of it and started arresting people. We wrapped corn and our belongings into sacks, writing our names on them, tying them tight and then carrying them over the border, my mother and I. Entering Hofberg, there was a small farm with a barn at the border, that was the plan. It wasn’t just us, there were people from Přední Fleky, all the way from Chudenín and Liščí people were hauling their things in the same direction.

If we hadn’t left, we’d have been sent to work with Czech farmers in the midlands. Our children may have been able to attend school, who knows. Or perhaps we would’ve been forced to accept Czech citizenship, otherwise we’d have been unable to do anything. We wanted to avoid that, that’s the reason we ran away to Bavaria. Dad wouldn’t have been allowed home either way. If he’d come home from captivity they’d have arrested him immediately as a deserter.

We’ve been holding our festival for years, but our ranks are thinning. When parents stop going and their children won’t take them, it’s all over. That’s bad. On the one hand I’m a little sad, but that is just biological necessity. It’s something the Czechs must have counted on, that the whole thing would eventually be put to sleep. I previously had a low opinion of Czechs, but since we’ve been working in Červené Dřevo and talking to two mayors from Chudenín who really appreciate it and gave us a ton of help, I said to myself: Why should we be any better? Since then we’ve been good friends. There’s a company from Skelná Huť which helped us with everything, lifting up all those gravestones. He (Adolf Šulan) only speaks in broken German, but we understand each other well.

But our work wasn’t useless, was it. Quite a few cyclists and other people visit the place. We know that when working inside, young people come along, mostly the young and they want to talk. They tend to be students from Prague and other places. Some apologise for the horrors that took place and for their parents. Some of them talk and some say nothing. I understand that. At the time we were enemies, despite being Czech citizens. Oh well, that’s years and years ago. The young people think differently, I have to give them that, they have sympathy, but they don’t just accept what happened.

When the borders opened, we went looking and saw the cemetery cross. That’s when we knew: aha, here’s the cross, this is where the cemetery was and over here is where the church must have been. There were two or three of the boys with me and they knew everything. From my altar boy days I remembered where the church and the morgue were. So we started searching for it all there. There was a whole forest grown over everything, only the cross stuck out a bit. And there, where the church used to stand we threw aside a bit of earth and saw there were ashes from a fire. So yes, it has to be somewhere here, this is where we have to dig it up. And that’s how we uncovered the foundations of the whole church and everything around it.