Karin Macháčková

"All her life she missed Germany, she never got used to it. And she always wanted to run away, and it happened that when Daddy was at work, at the boarding school, and we were at school, Mommy took a backpack, a piece of dry bread, and wanted to run away alone through the woods across the border. She thought that - she was just so naive that she thought if she ran somewhere deep in the woods she could get away, that she wouldn't get caught anywhere. And that she would come home, she wanted to return home. All her life - several times, probably four times, she failed to escape like that, you could say, because she was always caught by the border patrol because there were soldiers everywhere. It was already our soldiers who were guarding the border, so they always brought her back. Daddy had a terrible time with that afterwards. That was dangerous, Daddy had, well he was only lucky that he was... I can say it nowadays, otherwise I wouldn't brag about it, because he was a communist, only he was such an honest communist that he wouldn't steal a piece of toilet paper anywhere. And he never had anything. Never. He was convinced that the times that came for them, so that was right. That we were liberated. And that it was just right. Well, that was the only lucky thing, that when they called him the police afterwards to come and get my mum or something, it always sort of... You could say he talked around, talked around, he always said that he just, he didn't know about it and that, that it just, like, didn't work out that way. Well, that Mummy was longing to go back to Germany. Well, but it never worked, she had four attempts to escape - and it never worked. So then she didn't try anymore because she found out that she would either get shot or it would just end badly."

"My daddy was in that labour camp with my brother, who was not as likeable in character as my daddy, he was much more, more... like, he just didn't like the Germans. So it also happened that he was beaten up or someone hurt him. And sometimes he'd have to say something unpleasant to a German somewhere, and they'd take him aside and beat him so badly that they'd... my daddy said they'd knock all his teeth out. So his brother suffered a lot there. And so he endured all that until the 45', and when Daddy was coming back by those last trains, as a free man, actually, so his brother wouldn't have got back if he hadn't run away. He just would have probably been liquidated there before the war was over. But my parents, because they already had me in the carriage, so they got the biggest wicker carriage they could get in Rüdersdorf. And my dad took the risk of getting his brother out of that camp illegally, because those last days there were already such chaos in April, early May. And that last train, which was festooned full, that's what my parents told me that train was, so it was normally a train for... cattle trains it was, and it was full of people coming back from Germany, survivors. And his brother, they stuffed him into this big carriage, it was kind of deep and egg-shaped, and they stuffed him into the carriage because he was thin, he was weak, so they put him in the carriage, and put some rags on top of him, and they put me on top of it, and covered me, and on top of the blanket I was covered with, they had a loaf of bread. And that's how they got on the train with the carriage, which wasn't even carefully checked by the Germans, up to the border, yes, but in Prague, when they got to Prague, the train arrived, so they said at the station, my parents told me that the Germans were still there, which was interesting. That there were still German controls. And that they underwent so much terror and fear that they would look into that carriage and check. So they saw that a child was lying on top crying, so the control was not as strict anymore because they were in a hurry. They were checking everybody individually, but they just drove the carriage through and smuggled my uncle in the carriage."