Manfred Hubl

"I remember perfectly well how they moved us out. It was a late afternoon in spring of 1946. I was in our room with my mom, it was a room where we spent most of our time, we lived there, we ate there. Then, out of sudden, someone knocked the door and there were four people, a Czech man and woman, Czech policeman and the mayor who was assigned to the post. He spoke fluent German and announced my mom that these two people are new owners of our house and we have to move away right now. Mom started to cry, I was six at that time so I didn’t understand what was going on. Mom asked: ‘Where are we supposed to go?’ and she lamented and cried. Meantime, my dad came and other relatives gathered around, two sisters, one unmarried sister of my dad, and there was quite a bit of chaos. Because, where were we supposed to go? We were told that it’s been sorted out, we’ll go down the street, there’s an empty house, its owners have already moved away, we will take only things we need for the night and we will pick the rest of our stuff tomorrow. That’s how our house was seized."

We slowly drove miles and miles of dirt roads on a lorry. At the edge of the village, there was a triangular spot of lawn by a road crossing and there they unloaded us. They just left our luggage on the lawn and the lorry went away. But there was a deputy for refugees, his name was Bergmann and he had come before. The local council appointed him and he got all the information and he assigned lodging for the families. There were rules to it. He knew that there would be that many people coming from the refugee camp and the farmers knew who will be assigned the refugees. Depending on how much living space they had, they had to provide one or two rooms. It had been already sorted out where the refugees that had arrived from the camp would go: these three families to Alhofen, those three families there, those four families elsewhere. We were told that the Hubel family was to go to the Geltl’s farm. The house stood on a hillock and it was a nice house when we saw it from underneath. Large cherry trees grew in front of the house, it all looked imposing and we really liked it. But the deputy for refugees said right away that our family was too large and there wouldn’t be space enough for all of us. When we first came, only the farmer’s wife was at home, the farmer and the farm hands were in the field because it was harvest time. We came in, said who we were and she said right away: ‘Yeah, sure, do come in. Are you hungry? We have some maultaschen left over from lunch, will you have some?’ We had no clue what maultaschen were, it was a local type of filled pastry. We ate and it was the best meal I had had during the last months. The food at the camp was awful as I’ve already said.”

"Everywhere, there are all sorts of people. Someone is nice, friendly, generous to his peers, someone is tough and rough and doesn't share. It was the same between the farmers. The longer we were among them, the better could they see that we are the same people as they are, with the difference that we lost our homeland. And, importantly, when they got a beer together, only then did they find out what had hapen to us. Then they started to understand us better. After some time, everyone probably had good relationships so we could live normally side to side."