“The Russians came. I was a girl and I was afraid. I ran to the neighbours. They had a daughter. We hid from the soldiers by lying under the bed. In the morning my father came, crying. The small children cried, so many tears. We lost our mummy. Mummy was shot by the Russians. We have to go to the forest and see where we can find her. We lost our mummy. The Russians dragged her out on to the field and raped her. They left her lying there, and when she came to, she didn’t return home. She ran off a bit further from the village, where they had goats, and she hid with the goats. God, how we cried.”
“So we moved in there. Once again, we washed everything and put it in order. And we lived there peacefully until June. There was a farm nearby with a Slovak family. The man had two sons and a daughter. In the spring he came along and told us he wanted our house, that he had two sons and he would be fitting out a carpentry workshop, and that we had to go. Our brothers were away and we had to move everything. We had a small cart and we moved everything overnight, everything we needed we took with us. I was still recovering from giving birth. The man who wanted the house didn’t stay there anyway. His sons didn’t go there, nor did his daughter.”
“We were not deported, because Mum had contracted phlebitis. The doctor visited Mum once a week. We were supposed to go with the rest, but her inflammation meant we didn’t in the end. They stopped it. We already had a ticket. My father’s brother lived not far from us, and he did go. We were all packed and ready, but Mum contracted the inflammation, so it was said we’d go in the spring, but when spring came there was no more transport.”
“We lived by the graveyard at the end of the village in Staré Lublice. We couldn’t dig a well, because of the graveyard. We had to carry all the water in buckets from the neighbours. For the cows, for washing ourselves, our clothes. When we were little we had small buckets and we carried the water. We carried the water like that our whole lives.”
Elisabeth Kučová, née Schindlerová, was born on 12 November 1926 in Kružberk (German: Kreuzberg) near Vítkov. As with almost all of the local inhabitants, her parents were German nationality. During the war three of her brothers were drafted into the Wehrmacht. They all survived, but it was merely by stroke of luck that they did not end up in one of the prisoner-of-war camps in Soviet territory. However, they did not return home and they remained in the various occupation zones of Germany. The twins Franz and Erich were separated by the Iron Curtain for many years because Erich lived in the democratic Federal Republic of Germany, whereas Franz ended up in the communistic German Democratic Republic. Elisabeth’s father was also supposed to join the Wehrmacht, but his wife managed to persuade the German authorities that he was indispensable to the local economy. The end of the war brought the family even more suffering. Soviet soldiers raped Elisabeth’s mother, who was greatly traumatised by the event. The mother fell ill, and it was for this reason that the family was not included in the mass deportation. But as Germans they were forced to move several times because their house was always taken up one of the new settlers. In 1948 the family was then sent to forced farm work in the Tábor district with no prior warning whatsoever. Elisabeth was only allowed to stay because she had given birth to her first child the week before. It took several appeals before the authorities allowed her to marry the child’s father, the Czech Milan Kuča. Her husband finally managed to secure the family’s return in 1951. Elisabeth and Milan Kuča then lived with their children in Nové Lublice. Their house belonged to the local united agricultural cooperative, and in 1959 it was marked for demolition. And so one morning the whole family had to move once more, this time to the house of a relative in Nové Lublice, where Elisabeth Kučová lives to this day.
