Local farmers selected German families at the train station in Třebíč and took them with them, but we were the only ones whom nobody wanted
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Erich Böhm was born April 30, 1938 to German parents in Horní Lipová, but he spent his childhood in Domašov. During WWII, his father once failed to participate in a training of Volkssturm since he was busy at work, and as a punishment he was forced to join the Wehrmacht. Erich’s father then served as a warden in a prisoners’ camp, but several months later he was released from the army for health reasons and he returned home immediately before the end of the war. With a few exceptions, all the inhabitants of Domašov were deported to Germany in 1946. The Böhm family stayed, because Erich’s father who was a local postman was needed there to train a Czech postmaster. When he completed his task in May 1948, Erich’s parents, their three children and a three-month-old infant were loaded in a train car and transported to the Třebíč region to work in agriculture there. However, none of the local farmers were interested in a family with so many children, and so they were placed to a brick-kiln in Ptáčov, where they stayed in horrible conditions without drinkable water. Only after Erich’s mother hard effort and an intervention of the Red Cross they were eventually allowed to return home five months later. Erich Böhm, who could not speak Czech at all, finally began attending the first grade of elementary school when he was ten and a half years old. After elementary school he continued at the Secondary School of Agriculture in Šumperk and then he began working in the Transport Company in the then Gottwaldov (present-day Zlín) and later in the Energy Distribution Company in Zábřeh. He eventually relocated to Zábřeh and he continued working in this company until his retirement. In 1960 he married Emilie Jahnová and together they have been living in Zábřeh since that time.
