“In 1945, after the end of the war in May and October, the borders were open and those who wished so were free to go to Germany. The others were then deported later on. I chose to stay but life wasn’t easy afterwards for me. I had to work for a Czech landlord who made my life a hell. I was constantly being called the worst names. I wouldn’t wish this even my worst enemy. In 1945, I was seventeen years old. That landlord, he didn’t have me registered and thus he didn’t have to give me any money, so I worked for free there, I fed the cows and I worked there as a maid. It was in Harlas, nearby Cheb. Well, when I couldn’t stand it there any longer, I went to the chairman of the National Committee, today, it would basically be the mayor. There were only two farms in Harlas. And he could see that I toiled hard there. I had to work late and they didn’t even give me adequate food there. So he told that guy - he was then about twenty-five years old and I was seventeen – that I was supposed to run away and stay at their place. He told him to bring me down to the village in the evening.”
“He then accused me of putting pieces of broken glass into the trough for the cows to eat, even though I didn’t even have access to the trough and I would never do something like that in my life, to hurt an animal just because the owner is a bad man. Well, that chairman vouched for me, that he can’t complain about me and that I'm really hard-working. That former employer came to me and said that we could do something about it and that he could drop the charges. But I said that I hadn’t done anything. The mayor saw him drumming it into me and he went to him and talked to him. He then finally told the presiding judge that it wasn’t true. So he had to give me some money for libel. But as I was of German nationality, it passed to the state. Nevertheless, I was really happy that he finally had to admit that it had been a lie.”
“The deportations were pretty harsh. When you are only allowed to take fifty kilos of your personal belongings per person, you don’t know what to take, whether to go for a plate or a cup, or maybe some of your clothes. It was cruel. And when I was in Brtnov with my relatives, we had to be at home after nine o’clock - we weren’t allowed to go out. And we had to wear a white armband.”
Helena Potočková was born in 1928 and grew up as an orphan in a number of foster families in northern Bohemia. After the end of the war, as a seventeen-year-old Sudeten German girl, she was assigned as unpaid labor force to a farm that was ran by the new Czech owners. She experienced the deportation of the German population and later married a man who tried to escape across the border. Her brother went to Germany after the war. Mrs. Potočková and her husband moved to the Broumovsko region where they settled in Meziměstí and raised five children. She kept working in agriculture, in a textile mill or in the catering industry until a very high age.
