Monika Kubátová

“Imagine you have before and after school care. You start at half past five in the morning, the children are already waiting there - they shouldn’t be too noisy, then they go to class, where they mustn’t be noisy, then they have lunch, they mustn’t be noisy, and then they go for a walk. When they come back from the walk, there mustn’t be an uproar either. Well, so what do you think I did? I was terribly sorry for the children - they’d come into the canteen and be scolded for being too loud. I took them to a meadow and said: ‘Children, I know it’s terrible, everyone keeps asking you to be quiet and not make a noise. You know what, we’re on a meadow now, there aren’t any houses here, so you do whatever you want.’ The boys asked: ‘Can we yell?’ I just watched - I had a whistle, and they knew that when I blow three short whistles, someone is doing something he’s not allowed to. But I let them be, they kept on yelling, glancing at me all the time, but still I didn’t whistle, and I pretended not to hear anything. After a while one of them said to his mate: ‘Look, we better stop, or we’d lose our voice in a bit!’”

“Back then there were so many of us in the border region from mixed marriages that no one placed any importance on the matter, no one cared at all whether I was Czech or German. I don’t remember there being any problems. I spoke two languages, in fact, when I visited my [grand]parents and uncles from my mother’s side, all of us there spoke both German and Czech, and from my father’s side everyone spoke only German. So when I was walking along the street and unwittingly greeted a German in Czech, it was no big deal, he’d just smile, no problem.”

“We didn’t know how it was back then. All I remember is that when the first wave began, I was a little girl, and I heard a commotion in the street, so I looked out of the window and saw a load of women pushing prams along, and I shouted at Mum to ask where the children were going. Mum pulled me away from the window and said: ‘Don’t ask.’ Well, and my aunt was in the first wave. Not until forty-eight, when we found them - because we didn’t know which part of Germany they ended up in - did we discover that they’d just loaded them up in cargo wagons here in Ústí and taken them to the borders - but when they got there they didn’t want to let them pass, so they brought them back to Ústí. And this went on for three days apparently, without food or water.”