Johanna Cavagno

"It took us several days to travel by train through Germany and Bavaria to the Austrian border near Salzburg. There we crossed the border. When I think back on that journey, I actually perceived it as a child as a nice journey, well, not exactly nice, but safe. I felt safe because for the first time my mother was with us all the time. Before that we had only seen her fleetingly, always running around somewhere, looking for daddy or what she could bring him to camp. So it felt safe. The adults were understandably afraid, especially of the Russians, who often deliberately took whatever was left - alcohol, jewellery, watches - at the stops, and only then let the train go on. No one was allowed to get off at the border. And nobody got off either, except my mother - there had been no prohibitions for her for a long time. She went to the station building and phoned a relative who was the stationmaster there in Vöcklamart. It's only about 60 kilometres from Wels. She told him, 'We're here.' And he stopped the train in Vöcklamarkt, because otherwise we would have gone on to Linz or Vienna, but there was a Russian zone and we could not go back. So my uncle stopped the train and they unloaded our things on the platform. And just at the moment when everything was on the platform, we two children sitting on the ancient sofa, the locomotive came rushing by. Some drunken Russian in Wels had got it and drove and drove until he ran out of coal. And at breakneck speed. Luckily, a relative of my aunt's was standing next to us and rushed over to protect us, otherwise the whirlwind of air would have sucked us in. Just imagine: the rest of our possessions went through the air."

"At the very beginning the camp must have been located in some kind of courthouse, I don't know, because I only know it from the stories, so I don't want to talk about it in detail. It was my father's story, which was very frightening and horrible, and which we sometimes heard from afar as children. For myself, I can mention one situation where my father spoke directly to me, years later. It must have been sometime around All Souls' Day, when short devotions for deceased soldiers were usually held. There was a monument to the fallen at the church in our village. There was a short devotion and the lament 'Ich hatte einen Kameraden' [I had a friend] was sung, which is no longer played anywhere today. My father suddenly grabbed me violently by the arm and dragged me away quickly, I even had to run. I was about eleven or twelve years old. My father was crying bitterly, and then he just said to me, 'I can't even hear this song because we sang it every time someone cried out for the last time.' He shared that one memory with me."

"Maybe one sentence that says it all. My Czech grandmother once said to my mother - probably at the end of her life - 'You know, it's unbelievable how Hans, my father, accepted me.' At that time my grandmother had been struggling with a serious illness for a long time, and my mother replied in surprise: 'Why wouldn't he accept you?' 'Because I was Czech.' But that wasn´t discussed in the family at all. We also had many Czech relatives, for example in Prague or in the Teplice area."