"The journey to Szczecin in 1946 was not at all easy, because many people were moving west from eastern Poland, which was assigned to the Soviet Union or Ukraine. The borders of Poland were shifted to Germany, and in the east they were shifted again to Poland. So a lot of people went to those acquired territories because the Germans had left and they got the properties there after them. It was a flat area that was quite rich agriculturally, and people were streaming in there. It was kind of a migration of peoples and it was pretty hard to get on the train. I don't know at all how we got on the fast train to Szczecin in Katowice. The crowd pushed us onto that train. The journey was long and I saw the horror, for example when we were passing through Wrocław, which was completely bombed out. All that was left of the big buildings were chimneys and rafters. And by the time we reached Szczecin and were crossing the delta of the Oder River, there were about three bridges to cross. All of them were just makeshift, wooden. The train was moving slowly over that bridge, and some people were standing on the steps, ready to jump from that great height into the Oder River if something happened. It was interesting in Szczecin. I saw things there that were not to be seen here. We were walking through a residential area that had been completely bombed out, and the rubble had only been pushed to the edge by an excavator so that people could walk through the middle."
"Mum was in Stonava and Dad ran away. He got to the Ukraine and from the Ukraine the whole group of people were taken to Siberia. Then we got a letter, it was from the Krasnoyarsk region, the town of Kansk, they were in camps there and they were building a road. They had to take away stones. My father got sick there and went to the hospital. In the hospital he met a daughter of a Polish doctor who had also been deported there with his whole family. And since they had news that everything was broken, bombed out here, he married the young lady there. Then he was afraid to return, so he went to Poland, to Szczecin, and settled there. When my mother found out, we went there. I was 12 years old in 1946. The welcome was quite unusual, because the first sentence I heard from my father was, 'Why did you come?' It was embarrassing. Dad never came back. My parents divorced and I was left alone with my mum."
"When the war started, about a day or two before the Germans broke through the border, my dad escaped together with border guards and various publicly active people. He was involved in many activities. He played the violin, led choirs, was gifted in sports. Everybody knew him, and he was afraid, because by that time they already had reports about what Hitler was doing to people who were politically and publicly involved. He was putting them in concentration camps, which had been in Germany since 1932. So he and a whole group of friends, including those from Horní Suchá, fled from Hitler, and my mother stayed with me at my grandparents' house in Stonava."
Bronislava Nyklová, née Pastuszková, was born on 19 June 1934 in Horní Suchá, in the Karviná region. Her parents claimed Polish nationality. Her mother worked as a seamstress, her father worked as a teacher at Polish schools. After the Polish occupation of Těšín in October 1939, he was appointed headmaster of a Polish school in the Czech village of Vrbice. Fearing repression by the Nazi regime against Polish intellectuals, he fled to the Ukrainian part of the Soviet Union after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. He was deported to a labour camp in Siberia. There he met a young Polish woman, whom he married even though he was already married. He moved to Poland with his new wife after the war, and subsequently divorced Bronislava’s mother. Bronislava grew up in Stonava, which was part of the German Reich from 1939 to 1945. Although the Nazis discriminated against Poles, her mother refused to give up her Polish nationality. She was interrogated by the Gestapo because of her escaped husband. Bronislava attended a German school, and after the war she went over to a Polish grammar school. She studied Czech and Polish at the Faculty of Education in Olomouc. She worked as a teacher and headmistress of a Polish school in Karviná. In 2021 she was living in Havířov.
