“My name is Annelise Rösler. Nein, gar nicht! My name is Annelise Nippel. I am of German nationality, can I say that? I was born in Germany (meaning in the Sudetes - ed.) in 1933. Then the war ended, so I learnt Czech. But we still aren’t very good at it, because we didn’t have any school for it. Nor were we allowed to attend any school, I had to start working at the glass works when I was fourteen. And I left when I was fifty-five. In the meantime I had two children, I married in 1951, so I’ve spent 62 years with that man of mine.”
“I would want there to be no wars. Can you believe that till this day... I’ve told my husband countless times about dreams of war and the shooting. How we were in the train, in the cattle wagon. I haven’t processed it yet. I had it in my head just last night. It hasn’t gotten out of me yet.”
“After 1968 my married sister with a ten-year-old daughter decided to go to Germany. He (her husband) was Czech, and he went to Germany, and we stayed here. He also had a visa. My husband worked in the forests, they gave him permission, but they didn’t let me leave the glass works, they didn’t give me the stamp. And we didn’t want to leave illegally, we wouldn’t do that, it’s our home after all.”
“Then things quietened down a bit, and it wasn’t until after 1968 that people started leaving again. But this time they didn’t just have forty kilos, they took their furniture, they had whole wagons. The other ones who had been deported, they were against them: ‘You came here with everything, and back then in 1945 we had to...’ It was bad.”
“We were almost shot. Why did we go to Tanvald? My mum had relatives there and she insisted on seeing them one more time. There were French POWs at the Elektro-Praga factory, they had a French flag flying there. Some nutty German rode up on a horse and shouted: ‘Take that flag down, machen sie die Fahne unter!’ They refused - and shots were flying. It was war. So we ran over the hill until we got out of Tanvald. The Russians arrived overnight, from Frýdlant, Hejnice, they came down here and spent the night on the big meadow here.”
Mr and Mrs Rösler live in the Jizerské Mountains in Polubné, which is now a district of the town of Desná. They live in a house that belonged to Herbert Rösler’s parents, the same house in which he himself was born in 1930. In 1951 he married Annelise Nippel (*1933) from the nearby village of Ničovy domky. Her father served in the German army during WW2 and returned. Annelise had to start working at the Riedel glass works when she was 14. Herbert and Annelise were exempted from deportation, both because their fathers worked in the local glass works, but also because they sympathised with the Communist Leftist Workers’ Sports Union (WSU). In the 1970s they applied for permission to emigrate to West Germany, but their request was denied. After 1989 they did not consider emigration any more.
