“I was helping since I was twelve, with my grandma who died in 1940. I remember that she would tell me: ´Work on this row of cucumbers and you will find a watermelon there,´ They would always plant a watermelon in the rows in order to encourage us to work. We thus had to pick cucumbers, tomatoes, and later grapes. How old was I then, twelve years? We had to work. When I came home from school, buckets with fodder for pigs and cows were already prepared, and we had to feed them and draw water from the well.”
“Father went to the army in 1942, I think, and uncle Ludvík in 1943. He lost his leg; he stepped on a mine. And uncle Willi, he became lost completely, we still do not know anything about him. I requested some information about him at that time, but (they told me that) he was missing. So one of them was totally lost, one was wounded, and the others returned home, but they returned from captivity. (All the men were there). Uncle Frantík, as well as uncle Josef, had six children, four of them were boys, and they all had to join the army.”
“In the morning, at five o’clock perhaps, they ordered everybody to come. Everybody was allowed to take only twenty kilograms, and if they had an old person with them, what else would they be able to carry? It was nothing pleasant. We were lucky that our grandpa lived in a mixed marriage. Moreover, the man who took our farm was a very nice man. He went to Mikulov at that time and he did all the paperwork for us there. Mom and grandpa were allowed to stay, and as for me, it was still undecided, because I actually did not belong to anybody. But mom said that if I went, she would go as well, and they would then have to care for grandpa.”
In Mušov we lived as one family, Germans as well as Czechs
Gertruda Kočí
photo: Dobová fotografie pochází z archivu pamětnice, současná fotografie pořízena při rozhovoru.
photo: Dobová fotografie pochází z archivu pamětnice, současná fotografie pořízena při rozhovoru.
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Gertruda Kočí was born March 15, 1928 in Mušov (Muschau), a South Moravian village where most of the residents were German nationals. However, Gertruda grew up in the Zech family, which was of mixed Czech-German origin and her grandmother was a Czech from nearby Ivaň. The peaceful life filled with working on the family farm came to an end in 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. Men from Gertruda’s family, including her father, gradually had to join the army and she had to help her mother and grandfather with the farm work. After the liberation, her father was not allowed to return to Czechoslovakia, and the family has remained permanently separated. During the deportation of the German population from Mušov in 1945, her family was allowed to remain in the village owing to the mixed marriage of Gertruda’s grandparents, but they had to leave their farm. In 1954 Gertruda married and moved to Blansko, but she still kept in touch with friends and relatives in Germany and Austria and she was coming to regularly organized reunions. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the village was closed down and gradually flooded by the Nové mlýny water reservoir.
