Monika Kubátová

“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.”

“My mother’s brother married a lady, and she had a [female] cousin who lived in Dresden. I only know this from her, so it’s not my own experience, but I heard her tell it. A long time ago she lived in Koštov, and her cousin was in Koštov. In 1947 and 48 the Germans who lived in Ústí, if able to, would cross the borders to get something that they had hidden with their relatives, for instance. And it was the same for her. So she’d come to my aunt, she’d be there, say, for three days, they’d give her food and some of the things she had hidden there and needed. And this aunt had witnessed the raid on Dresden that we had seen in Ústí, in the night, the light from how everything burned there. She said that when the air raid began, there was a circus set up in the square. A lot of people started running into the circus because they didn’t want to be in the houses - those were being bombed hard. They were there for some time, and then suddenly the circus manager came and told them to leave immediately because the animals were getting lose, that they could smell the fire, and that they couldn’t ensure safety any longer. So she ran out, there was a soldier there, and when he saw her with her little girl, he caught her, pulled her down and sheltered her under an elephant. That was the only animal to stay put; but when the bombing came closer, it started to move, and so they and the soldier ran. Huge crowds of people were fleeing to the Elbe because they wanted to jump into the water - they didn’t know the bombs were phosphorus. When they neared the bridge, someone yelled at them: ‘Don’t go there, everyone on the bridge is on fire!’”