Osvald Hons

* 1938

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  • "We had the funeral on the afternoon of May 8. It was around two o'clock, the funeral. We went back home. My dad's dad [had] the funeral. They made lunch and we went with my grandfather and my sister to the gardens. These were what were called Schreiber gardens, which meant that they were established sometime around 1908, and people who lived in Mimoň and didn't have gardens near their house had gardens like that, so they had a garden there. And when we were at the end of Lark Street, already at the gardens, we heard some noise. Planes flying. So we were looking and looking for them and we were about twenty yards past the entrance to the allotments, it was a little bit different to how it is now. Into the garden shed. There were some planes coming in from the left from the south and then something started falling out of them and I still remember saying, 'Fallschirmjäger.' Like parachutists, but they were bombs and they started going off. So we got scared and I said, 'These are unseren,' these are ours. 'Hakenkreuze,' they have crosses. We didn't wait any longer and quickly took off, hiding in the last house where a man named Jirout lived. There we hid and [there was] a rumble. And in later times, according to other accounts, I have studied that it was supposedly bombed by the Russians. Of course it was bombed by the Germans, I saw it with my own eyes."

  • "And Mr. Hons, you once told me a story about how the inhabitants of Mimoň were there and displayed Hitler in the window...?" - "Coincidentally, her name was also [Barschková]. And there were either some relatives living in that house. That was a real neighborhood, there were semi-detached houses in Lark Street. We were on the right side and the entrance was on the left side of that lady [Barschkova]. When it was Adolf Hitler's birthday, I think April 20, there was Adolf Hitler, festive decorations and a red flag with a white field and a hakenkreuz. Let's say with the Indian symbol of happiness, I guess it is, but there it's reversed. When he committed suicide on April 30, the decoration was repeated, but in a mourning design. And on the 10th of May, or was it the ninth, but more like the tenth, there was a decoration: Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, Edvard Benes and Stalin. There was also a red flag behind them, but the hakenkreuz was no longer there. Whether it was burned, I don't know, I can't serve anymore. The Czechoslovak flag was there, but I don't remember the hammer and sickle being there, I don't know. Probably just the red and the Czechoslovak flag was there. To this day I wonder where she got that Stalin..."

  • "The second memory is connected with the raid on Dresden at the end of February 1945. At that time, it was not just one, but there were others. It happened that an English plane very probably flew over Dresden and was shot down somewhere over Saská Kamenice - somewhere between Saská Kamenice and Česká Lípa. The plane had a crew of six and they were all English. They all escaped, one went down before Mimoň and the other two between Mimoň and Kuřivody. They were all taken prisoners. The English had a somewhat looser regime than the others at that time. I don't know why, but it was probably the end of the war. So my grandfather met them because they were working somewhere in the woods. So he came to us, and this was sometime in March, late March. I remember him coming and saying something to the effect that he had a boy like me at home too. A fortnight later he came to our place again and brought me a plane. I remember exactly that it wasn't a hakenkreuz, a swastika, but that they were the insignia of English aircraft. Even the colour was this strange grey-blue. I was terribly happy about it, I remember at the time [saying] I was going to show off at school that I had a wooden plane. I wouldn't let that out of my hands. But the next morning the plane was gone. It just flew away. My parents thought I was going to take it to school, and that would have gone very, very badly."

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    Liberec, 25.04.2024

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    Liberec, 06.05.2024

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I’m a Sudeten. Not geopolitically, but geographically.

Witness as a student of the Higher Vocational School of Glassmaking in Nový Bor, 1953
Witness as a student of the Higher Vocational School of Glassmaking in Nový Bor, 1953
photo: Archive of the witness

Osvald Hons was born on 2 April 1938 in Mimoň into a mixed Czech-German family. The Hons family lived through World War II in Mimoň, where at the end of the war they witnessed the bombing of the town. After the seizure of the borderlands, his father refused to accept the new citizenship of the Great German Reich and was sent to work in Germany. Because the family was strongly left-leaning, its members did not have to be included in the post-war expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia. Osvald Hons’ family was therefore able to remain in Mimoň after the war. In 1945, he entered the second grade of a Czech school, where he quickly acquired Czech. After graduating, he entered a glassmaking school in Nový Bor, where he gained knowledge in glassmaking technology. After completing his compulsory military service from 1957 to 1959 in Slovakia and in Červená Voda, he returned to school. He completed his education at the Higher Industrial School of Glass in Nový Bor and started working at the Research Institute of Applied Glass. After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops, he was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia after party checks and declared a right-wing opportunist. Later he worked in the labouring professions until 1971 when he joined the uranium mines in Hamr na Jezeře as a miner. After a serious accident in 1983, he worked only on the surface and then retired. Osvald Hons lived in Mimoň even at the time of filming (2024) and devoted himself to his greatest hobby, which is regional history. We were able to record his story thanks to financial support from the town of Mimoň.