The expulsion of the Germans was like the expulsion of the Jews
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Anděla Kulhánková was born in Unhošť, lived with her parents in Kyje, and eventually they moved to Horní Počernice in 1939. Her family was dealt several blows during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. During the war, she was attending a “family school” (where girls learn how to take care of the household) and lived with her aunt in the center of Prague. At that time, the Heydrich assassination happened. Her aunt was hiding one of the resistance fighters who was helping those who carried out the mission. When the Gestapo came to their apartment for a random house-search, he hid himself in the ventilation shaft on the toilet. Fortunately, he wasn’t found. But her aunt was arrested and sent to Ravensbrück anyway after several months, and she never returned. At the same time, her father was sent to a concentration camp because of listening to foreign broadcast after being reported by an innkeeper in Horní Počernice. Anděla Kulhánková herself worked as an au-pair in 1943, until she was sent to Germany for forced labor. She worked in a gunpowder factory close to Stuttgart with other Czechs, Ukrainians, French and other nationalities that were each doing a specific part of the work. Upon returning to Prague, she was immediately sent back on forced labor, but this time only to Kolín. This experience, however, was far worse than that in Germany. Here, other Czechs regarded her as inferior because she returned from the Reich. Fortunately, these hardships didn’t last long as the war was over in a couple of months and everyone could return to their families. Once the war ended, Mrs. Kulhánková enrolled in a course for kindegarten teachers and she moved to borderlands as part of the frontier settlement programme as early as October 1945. As well as her other friends, she was motivated by nothing but sheer enthusiasm for her country. But at the same time, that was when she got to know the negative side of the nation she wanted to help so much to rise after the war. Expeditions of Czechs looting homes after the Germans became almost a rule. Those who really stayed and lived there had to fight for the very basic things necessary for living. She also had hard time dealing with how these people behaved towards the Germans who had lived here for hundreds of years and now were to be expatriated. And because there was no cultural life in the village, she was trying to make it up for herself by building a library and creating herbals. When she got married in 1949, she returned to Horní Počernice. There, her family that was recovering from the hardships of the occupation was struck by the Communist policy of nationalization. They lost all their property. The real estates were taken officially; other things were simply stolen for the Communists’ private needs. Right in 1950, she started working in the local kindergarten and stayed there long until retirement, raising generations of children in Horní Počernice.
