Ingeborg Larišová

"I have this unpleasant memory from school. I was in first grade and I was sitting in the first row with one of my classmates. I had a wooden ruler at first. Nowadays, they don't even make those anymore. Later, my mother bought me a celluloid one. That was something! I treasured it. This classmate had the same one, and suddenly, a situation arose where he thought I had his ruler, but I had mine. I was holding my ruler, and he started pushing me, and we started fighting. And then, our teacher came into the classroom and asked what was happening. The kids said we were fighting over the ruler. The teacher came to me, looked at me, then at the other children and said, 'Don't be surprised, children, she has Germanic blood in her.' I didn't understand it, of course, but I told my mother about it at home. She wouldn't tolerate it. She said she'd go there and sort it out with her. She told her that instead of uniting the children from mixed marriages after the war, she was dividing them further apart.

"My father's entire family was deported to Germany, and in Schwandorf, where my father died, my friend had a husband. They didn't use to go to the cemetery, but after the husband died, his wife started going there and found a corner with a memorial to the bombing. There was a big cross there, and there was a description of the bombing: how many factories and hospitals were destroyed. And all around were tombstones with the names of the fallen people and people who died in the hospitals. The lady was looking at it and suddenly saw our father's name. He was the first one on one of the tombstones. It only had his date of birth written on it, no date of death. But since there was a date of birth, it meant his documents must have been found. The lady took a picture of it and sent it to our family in Heidelberg, and they sent it to us. It was about twenty-five years after the war when the grave was found. We went there about five years later and looked for that grave."