“There was the winter wheat in the fields in May, and we slept there; we went to sleep in the middle of the fields so that the Russians would not rape us. You could hear it; we lived in an isolated place, and from the village Údlice you could hear the screaming… I don’t even want to repeat it, I will really not speak about it, it was not nice. This is war; the Germans did the same things in Russia.”
“The SA (came to the Sudetenland – ed.’s note), they were Nazis. They were called SA and they wore a kind of brown uniforms like soldiers. I was there with my father, who was pushing a pram with my little brother – my first brother; the second brother was born after my dad had died. We were thus walking with the pram through Údlice, and they were marching there. One of them, the one who walked in the front, suddenly stepped out, and he hit my father in his face. Why? Because dad did not salute the flag; he should have taken his hat off.”
“There was one Lagerführerin, she always wore her hair in a bun at the back of her head like this, a true German woman, including her appearance. She was not ugly, but she was this tough kind of a woman. Whenever Hitler spoke, all of them had to sit down and listen to it, and I was in the kitchen cooking so I did not have to. But later, when I was no longer cooking and the speech was repeated, she would tell me: ‘Mili, go and sit down there, Führer spricht.’ If they had tested me on what he had said I would not have remembered anything at all, I was not listening to it at all. I was resting there, but I was absolutely not paying attention to what he was saying.”
Emílie Reinišová Krýdová, née Frenzelová, was born January 22, 1923 in Třebušice near Most into a German family as the eldest of seven children of Mr. and Mrs. Frenzel. Her father Josef was a Czech legionnaire. They moved to Údlice soon after and Emílie attended elementary school there. Subsequently she studied a girls’ grammar school in Chomutov and then she enrolled in a trade school in the same town, but the school was then closed down by the Nazis during the WWII. In summer 1941, after she turned eighteen, she was summoned for a one-year service in Arbeitsdienst. She was assigned to work in Stade near Hamburg where was going to help farmers. After a month she was sent to work in a kitchen instead, and she spent the remaining time of her service there. She experienced the air raids on Hamburg as well as compulsory listening to Hitler’s speeches. After her return from Germany she worked in a shop in Chomutov. In October 1945 the labour office sent the family to work in Milevsko, but a month later they were sent back to the border region. Emílie however stayed in Milevsko working as a housekeeper and she missed the deportation of her family from Czechoslovakia. It took ten years before she was able to see her relatives again. Until 1972 she worked as a shop manager in Milevsko, she married and she had two sons. After the death of her first husband she remarried and she moved to Prague where she worked in a kindergarten and then in the Blaník cinema on Wenceslas Square. In November 1989 she accidentally happened to get involved in the Velvet Revolution. Emilie Reinišová Krýdová passed away on July, the 18th, 2018.
