Inge Richtrová

"Dad fought, he went to war, his brother too, he was also from that village. After that, for a long time my mother didn't know anything about him, nobody knew much about how it turned out. Dad's sister went with three kids and she didn't know where she was going either, she didn't know about her husband and she didn't meet her husband, he fell, and our dad didn't fall. Then he got in touch, so he wrote to us, and we thought we were going [to the removal] in the autumn, but it had stopped. Mum had her suitcases ready, we could take what we wanted, it was allowed. And the ones before that just had little suitcases and they had to go. Mum could have packed a lot of things by then, but because they stopped it, a lot of those families stayed in the villages all the way to Moravská Třebová, a lot of those Germans."

"They [Soviet soldiers] drove cars and horses around the village, they went to families, everyone locked themselves in and didn't want to let anyone in. I also remember them saying, 'Davaj suda, davaj suda', my mother protected us. They used to take the men in a wagon to the meadow behind ours, that was just behind ours, I saw that as a kid, I was six or seven years old, so I used to look through the crack in the shed. They were standing there in a line, there were shots and they were shooting them. Then there was talk about it, my mother said it was the chairman and other guys that I perceived as a kid. Mum chased us away and didn't want us little ones to see it, then we didn't go back to it, mum didn't introduce us to it and didn't want to talk about it. They talked a lot of things among the women, but they spoke German in front of me so that I didn't have to know, otherwise it was only Czech afterwards."