“The German employees who worked in the train station or the glassworks started to provoke us. At school, the teacher told us that it was not good for us Czechs. The Sudetendeutsche Partei (Sudeten German Party – trans), I mean Heinlein´s party started to expand. And it resulted in the fact that most of those employees of the Riedel glassworks were forced to join the party and behave accordingly. Unfortunately, this was also reflected in the behaviour of the German children, and of my friends, Hilda, Klaus, and Christopher. Suddenly, they started to create their own groups. You could also see it on the clothes which were typical of them. The girls used to wear white knee-high socks and the boys used to wear waistcoats with Hakenkreuz (Swastika - trans.). And then it also manifested itself by the Germans putting posters in the shops which read “Shop only at our, your friends´ shops, do not give the damn about Czechs! I remember that to get to the village from the station in Dolní Polubný, we had to walk through a tunnel under a track, which ran along the fence of Riedel's glassworks, and at that time a lot of posters of the Sudetendeutsche Partei with Hakenkreuz (Swastika - trans.) started to appear there. As Czechs, we were psyched up by our parents and also school and so I tried to tear off the posters. An older man caught me, slapped me a few times and scolded me in German. And he told me was lucky. If the Germans or older children had caught me, it would have ended much worse for me."
“It was complicated for me and my mum because my brother was being treated for tonsillitis in Tanvald hospital. Back then tonsillitis was quite an unpleasant illness, I think that it took six weeks to cure it because antibiotics were not known. So, at first, my mum went with a pram and me to Tanvald hospital to pick up my brother. German doctors did not want to let him go because according to their opinion, he had not been fully cured. Mum who could speak both German and Czech very well managed to find a Czech doctor and he arranged for us to take him. We had to wait all night for the train to the interior at the train station. It was one of the most horrible nights I experienced as a child. The Germans were already going wild. We cried and sobbed a lot there. You could constantly hear Germans screaming, thanking the führer for returning their homes, Heimat, to them. Even though they had lived with Czechs in Czechoslovakia for hundreds of years, at that moment they considered the Reich, not the Czech Republic, to be their homeland.”
“Because of the fact we lived in seclusion, some people like partisans appeared in those forests close to us. I know they had guns, machine guns during those last days. And there was a railway line about a kilometre as the crow flies, and they were shooting at the trains from the hill above it. Then the Russians came there, it was a second squad. They arrived with horses and lorries. They liked it at our place, so they camped in the meadows. There was a village half an hour's walk from us, I went to get beer for my father, then I took it home and the Russians confiscated the beer. And to stop me crying, they gave me a bicycle. It was the first bicycle that I ever saw, they had confiscated it somewhere, so it was already quite old. I rode it three or four times and I had to throw it away. Its tube cracked and I could not ride it anymore. And another thing. When the Russians moved away, they gave two horses to our family. What could we do with them? Nothing. So, we handed them over to the National Committee.“
“Back then there were activities to save here what we could from culture. We as a group went to the attics of houses and villas of wealthier people in Lidové sady because they stored old German books there. People started to burn some things. But because there was a library here, they started carrying it in the library because it was found out that the books were really valuable. Especially the local history books. Even though we took a lot of them to the library, I as a student saved a lot of them and took a lot of them away. And I still keep them on my bookshelves, I used them a lot during historical walking tours. When we arrived at the station in Janův Důl there were also Germans books there, I know that there was the book Mein Kampf by Hitler which of course the employee did not take with him when he ran away because he had other things to do than to take these books. I know that some books were destroyed, some were burnt, and some were taken and hidden by smarter people. The books were later in libraries and during communism, it was hard to access them as the so-called Sudetikum. It meant that one had to have a special document for them. However, some books were left and after all they are evidence of the past of the area.”
“When the screenings were done, they found out that I was not suitable. It was because when Gottwald was elected my father said about him here at the railroad company that he boozed with German Communists in the Sudetenland in 1938. They organized a meeting in Sokol gymnasium back then and Klement Gottwald came to attend it. And they, as we know from history, celebrated here. Well, my dad said it about him in public at the train station. A colleague of his reported him and my dad was fired immediately. Although they employed him again a month later and wanted him to apologize, it stayed in his and my cadre report.”
“They placed me with the reconnaissance unit in the Bohemian Forest which was quite dangerous because it was in the 1950s. We as members of the reconnaissance unit deputized border guards. Fortunately, after a month I was selected for the NCO school at the airport in Liberec, even though I did not want to go there. Because I had already had enough of school. An English Rangers captain was the commander of the school, so we as members of the reconnaissance unit experienced training as if in England. We had to wear a tie to muster every morning. After finishing the training, I returned to a separate reconnaissance unit in the Bohemian Forest. And because I did sports and there was already an army physical education club back then, plus I had friends at headquarters, I was transferred to Sušice. There was an army garrison house where I played volleyball instead of soldiering." 1:35:35 - 1:36:56
We wanted to escape from the borderline area as soon as possible
Bohumil Nádhera (third from the left, in the middle of the second row) in the Hoši od Orlice (Boys from Orlice) association while sledging at the end of 1938
Bohumil Nádhera was born on 28 February 1930 in Liberec. His father Bohumil Nádhera was a trained mechanical locksmith and worked on the railway as a shunter. His mum Růžena, a trained shop assistant strung beads at home. Bohumil Nádhera had a brother Rudolf who was three years younger. Until 1938 they spent their childhood in Dolní Polubný in the area of the Jizera Mountains. They attended a Czech elementary school - the one-room school in Tiefenbach, nowadays Desná III. Their friends were mainly German children. However, the relationships between Czechs and Germans were getting worse because of the growing influence of the Sudeten German Party. German friends suddenly started to call Czech children names like dogs and swine, they were for them Böhmische Hunde und Schweine. Czech railwaymen and police officers had to accompany them to school because of fear for life. The family moved inland shortly after the Munich Dictate in 1938 and after the cession of the border area to Germany. During the war, the Nádheras lived not far from Doudleby nad Orlicí in Hradec Králové Region in seclusion in a house without electricity. At the end of the war, they witnessed the activities of partisans who were attacking passing trains. After liberation, Soviet soldiers stayed for some time in the meadows near their home. The Nádheras returned to the North of Bohemia shortly after the liberation. Bohumil and his father saw some devastated prisoners from the local concentration camp Gross-Rosen in Rychnov u Jablonce. The family experienced the expulsion of Germans from Liberec and the burning of German books. However, Bohumil and his friends tried to save the precious ones. After his Secondary school leaving exam at the grammar school in Liberec, he studied at the Faculty of Education at Charles University. During his military service, he served in a reconnaissance unit in the Bohemian Forest. He then started to teach at the elementary school in Stráž nad Nisou where he worked for forty-four years. In 1968, he participated in founding the legendary race, the Jizerská 50. On 24 August 1968, he attended the funeral of seven victims of the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops which took place in Liberec crematorium. In his free time, he devoted himself to sports, coaching volleyball, mountaineering, geology, and local history until late in life. He wrote a number of scientific articles, local history, and historical brochures, and two books on expeditions to the Himalayas.
Bohumil Nádhera (third from the left, in the middle of the second row) in the Hoši od Orlice (Boys from Orlice) association while sledging at the end of 1938
Bohumil Nádhera (third from the left, in the middle of the second row) in the Hoši od Orlice (Boys from Orlice) association while sledging at the end of 1938
As a mountain climber at the symbolic cemetery of mountain climbers at Hrubá Skála in the Bohemian Paradise in 2015 (the witness is standing on the left, next to him is the parish priest of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, former outstanding mountain climber Aleš Jaluška)
As a mountain climber at the symbolic cemetery of mountain climbers at Hrubá Skála in the Bohemian Paradise in 2015 (the witness is standing on the left, next to him is the parish priest of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, former outstanding mountain climber Aleš Jaluška)
