Gernot Schnabl

"Every now and then a Czech came and took something from us. For example, one came with a horse-drawn cart and took away my mom's new furniture without having even said anything beforehand. Two men just came and loaded the furniture on the cart. But the mother used to say he was a decent man because in exchange, he brought us his old furniture, which was even taken up the stairs. My father had a motorbike. It was a 1200 cm3 Wanderer and it was standing in the attic. When my father went to war, he took off the chain and put it in a can of paraffin oil standing on the stairs. Two Czechs came and wanted to take away the motorbike. They turned up with a loaded gun and were already carrying it [the motorbike] down the stairs. When I heard they wanted to take it, I immediately grabbed a can with a chain and threw it on the street into the bomb crater where the adults used to throw waste. The men carried the motorcycle down and found out that they couldn't ride it anyway because the chain was missing. So they went again with a fully loaded pistol to my mother, where the chain was. My mother said that it was on the stairs, but there was nothing any more. Until my mother died, I never told her where the chain had got nor that it had been my doing. I could feel how terrified she was. Another time I was stopped on the street by three Czech boys, a bit older than me and they had a pistol again. I had to put my hands at the back of my head and they took my pocket knife from my pocket. We couldn't defend ourselves, those were really really bad times. "

"My mom baked bread from potatoes and sawdust, that's what we ate. I had always wanted to ski and one year, I got a pair of old skis from one of my aunts. She gave me some ski wax as well but my dad took it away and used it to make some candles for Christmas. We couldn't buy them. And they burned out in one minute. Dad also made stars for the Christmas tree. We kept the Christmas traditions of the old homeland. We baked the sweetbread and other things we knew from home. We also had hung apples and sweets on the tree. But in fact, we did not have any sweets or candy so we used the empty wrappers."

“Then we were told that we have to move away. We children couldn’t imagine it. My mom was a seamstress so she sewed us little backpacks which would fit our backs. Then we got information that the following day at 8 in the morning, we were to assemble in the street in front of the house with a piece of luggage of fifty kilos which we were allowed to take with us. Mom packed our things. I was sitting on the bed all night long, I was cutting the slides out from their little glass frames, it was a valuable memory of my father. Photographs of the town and the surroundings and of us, children. Mom wanted to take them with us at all costs but glass was too heavy, the slides were stored in such small wooden boxes. We put the film slides into an envelope which we hid in our luggage. We managed to bring them with us to our new homeland.”