Margareta Riegerová

“We didn’t have electricity and President Novotný helped us. I wrote him about my situation, explaining that we have remained here and that we wanted to stay and raise our children here. I still had my grandma then. I wrote all this to the president. You wouldn’t believe it. We received a reply in three days. He wrote that he would look into the matter and that if what we had written was true, we would get electricity installed without any problems from their side. It was in 1964. We were preparing firewood up there, and all of a sudden I look up and exclaim: ´Christ Jesus...´ There were some long vehicles arriving. Well, within one month we had the poles erected here and electricity installed. It was in winter, and they couldn’t dig the holes in the ground for the poles, and they had to make them using explosives. They erected the poles and dropped into these holes.”

Edwin Rieger: "When they were demolishing the houses there, I was working in the field with the horses. I was working at the farm. I saw the men riding away on bikes. They let the houses explode. They loaded explosives into their basements and blew them up. We had to open all the windows. She then told me about it, because I wasn’t at home." Margarita Riegereová: "We continued to live here, but when they were demolishing the houses, they told us to go out. Our house remained standing, but all the windows and doors were broken, because the house was near to it. Now he has a beehive there. We purchased the garden later. All of our windows were smashed. We had opened all of them, but the blast broke them. We were here upstairs, and we were watching it. What a horror!"

“I talk to one of the neighbours on the phone. It’s been over sixty years. We talk on the phone with Margot every day. And with her brother, too. He lives in Munich, and she in Augsburg. They come here for holiday every year. They lived there... There had been three houses in a row, we are the first of them, and there were two others." Interviewer: "So they were coming here afterwards?" M. R. "They were. But her husband then died, and now she comes only sometimes with her daughter. She is one year older than me, she is seventy-nine." Interviewer: "And when were the houses demolished?" M.R.: "Right after the war. They came there, they took some nice closets from the houses, or the roof beams, they cut them and burnt them as firewood." Her husband E.R.: "They demolished them in 1958.”

“It was very bad, because we couldn’t speak a word in Czech. I was working and they ordered me to do something. I didn’t understand anything at all. I didn’t know what to do. The other people would take a hoe, a pickaxe or a pitchfork. But I didn’t know. They had so many tools in front of the office. When I didn’t understand a single word, I would just pick something. They would point to me: No, no. So I put it back. It was terrible when you didn’t understand anything and you didn’t know what to do.”