Dora Gebhardt

“The castle was empty, it belonged to a refugee from Poland, Silesia, Lehnice, who also had to run away. So they were basically kind to set it up, however you want to call it, for refugees. This castle was essentially a luxury shelter. People didn’t have to sleep in barns or barracks, the walls were strong, families often had a whole room to themselves and it was nicely set up. And the community stuck together, people knew each other a bit.”

“So on 30 August we went from Mikulovice, the former munitions factory called Muna stood there, it served as a camp. And over the months of February to November 1946, over 51 000 people were (we say) deported, or transported from there in cattle cars. And my parents were part of thirty railway cars with twelve hundred people who were initially registered in Furth im Wald, their final destination was Bamberg. Then they were housed for thee days in the St. Martin school in Bamberg, from there to the empty police academy in Ebermannstadt, also Franconian Switzerland, and from there they were further reallocated. They spent a fortnight in a camp, in that police academy, as they told me. Then about a hundred and fifty people came, who were in that railway train, came to the empty castle, which was designated as a refugee camp. That’s were I grew up, that’s where I have my earliest memories from.”

“At the castle, my family and the other people living in the castle who were very close, the old people met up and sat together on the bench outside, according to the season, they only talked about the homeland there. I didn’t know what they were talking about, I didn’t know my homeland or the people they were discussing. I kept relating things to the present, but they didn’t fit. Then I realised they were talking about something else and not about the people I imagined. So I asked, pointedly, over and over again, are you talking about our home here, or about the real home? For me my home was the castle. And the real home was in Sudety. That’s what we called it as children.”