Robert Böhm

Another thing I remember is when the front lines were approaching, they drove whole convoys of concentration camp prisoners through Nýrsko. Those people were begging us, and it was forbidden, but nevertheless some few Nýrsko citizens gave them some bread or something to eat. It was terrible. And nobody knew theere was another transport which stopped at the station and where they shot anyone who couldn’t carry on or was too sick. The German citizens knew nothing about it, maybe a few individual people. And there were mass graves at the Jewish cemetery in Nýrsko and 108 concentration camp victims were buried there. The Germans, all older men, then had to dig them up. It was terribly hot, it was that June. And then they had to wash the bodies. There were coffins, just simple crates, which they put them in down at the square, where the second Nýrsko church used to stand, that’s where they laid them out before burying them. The people of Nýrsko had no idea that a massacre had taken place there. And at the funeral the Germans had to carry the coffins, four men at a time, up on a bier, at the new cemetery they dug up each grave and buried them there. To stop anything from going wrong, four American tanks with machine-guns drove about, to stop people from rioting. As boys we were really interested in things like that, at thirteen years old, so we sat on the cemetery wall. We could see from above and behind, two men always brought the bier down and two stayed with the coffin. And there at the back, the Americans couldn’t see there. That’s where the Czech mob stood. And those old men, carrying the coffins, there they even beat them.

(That family) in our neighbourhood had a little farm, about 200 metres from the place we lived. Sepp Peschl joined the mountain huntsmen and was deployed in the Balkans to fight against Tito’s partisans. When he returned relatively soon from captivity, the Americans had prohibited the carrying of arms, on pain of death. But Sepp took little notice of that, carrying his military pistols on his person whenever he crossed the border in 1946. At the time, he and his brother-in-law were helping people on the other side, and when it became clear that expulsion was coming, they smuggled things over the border, for a price of course. And one day they were on the other side, approaching with a full load to the border, close by Ostrý, where there was a Czech border patrol waiting for them. And then it started. Shots. “Hands up!” and Sepp of course, his blood was boiling, pulled out his military pistols and a shootout started. He shot one soldier dead, wounded another and the third one shot Sepp. The brother-in-law escaped by running back over the border. Not long ago the niece of this Sepp, from Straubing, told me over the phone that it took fifty years for his family to get a death certificate from Prague. Yes, that’s the kind of thing that went down back then.

And then we headed back with our father to Rittsteig. We found a place to live there. I was thirteen years old. Every other night I walked from Rittsteig to Nýrsko, illegally crossing the border and smuggling the most essential belongings we had over the border. That lasted for about a fortnight, and then we found a flat in Schmolz, in the village of Lamm. Two small rooms, the only furniture was an old table. We had to knock up some stools ourselves to have something to sit on. We only had hay to sleep on. My parents used to sleep on horsehair mattresses in Nýrsko, just so you know. Those were bad times. In order to make some money we went to sawmills and collected saw blades with broken mountings. And at the forge we pressed and shaped them into knives, grinding them and then making handles for them out of cherry or plum wood by hand. And then we traded these knives with the farmers for food.