And then in 1978 was the first we came back to our native country. We had to ask for visas and then I went with my children and husband to Kraslice and then to Hoi. And at Hoi, the plateau, all the homesteads had been levelled. There was nothing standing, everything had been torn down.
And then a little while later we found out our grandfather died and they brought him later in a zinc coffin escorted by two armed soldiers. That tin coffin was tied up with leather straps and we wanted him to be buried in Frankenhammer (today Liboc v Kraslicích) and we pulled him along in a cart. Other of his mourners joined us along the way. And someone kept checking the straps to see if the coffin had been opened or not. My grandmother kept saying” “It’s not possible, Moritz was a much bigger man, he would never fit in such a small coffin!” And then with no clergy present they just buried him somewhere in Frankenhammer close by the morgue. My uncle counted steps to remember the place where he may have been buried, so that if we ever came back there we could find out where they buried him.
So then it was our turn to go to a camp, to Kraslice. We were there for a while and were of course only allowed to take so much with us, a quota of kilograms per person. And then they loaded us onto cattle cars, the box ones, without windows, and we didn’t know where we were going. Then it got moving and then the doors opened and we were in Nuremberg. People from the Red Cross came along and gave us soup, warm soup and then we carried on to Würzburg. And that was a Würzburg which had been bombed to pieces, so we were in another camp. Before that we were naked in one room, all of us at once, where the Americans sprayed us all with DDT to disinfect us and then we spent four weeks in Würzburg. Hungry in a bombed-out Würzburg, everything looked bleak. Later we went to a gym in Goldbach near Aschaffenburg and slept on straw beds. Everyone there was traumatised and without hope.
Margit Schödlbauer was born on 18 August 1938 in Kraslice (Graslitz in German) as the daughter of railway clerk and amateur painter Arthura Hüttel and his wife Franziska, née Sandner. Six months after she was born, her parents ran away with her to Saxony to avoid the Czechoslovak general mobilisation, and returned in the autumn of 1938 after the Sudety had been occupied. Little Margit lived in Oloví (Bleistadt), where she also began attending a German school, at the end of the war her grandfather Moritz Sandner took care of her on his farm near the village of Mlýnská (Konstadt). Two Polish prisoners of war were working on the farm and the family got along with them well. Their father fought with the Wehrmacht in the Balkans, caught malaria and only returned after the end of the war. In April 1945 American soldiers arrived, their family home was right next to the demarcation line between the American and Soviet zones. Soon Czech commissars arrived at the farm and confiscated all the food. The family was no longer allowed to use their own property. Meanwhile that autumn Moritz Sandner was called to commissariat. He was imprisoned in nearby Rotava (Rothau) and Jindřichovice (Heinrichsgrün). He returned home dead in a coffin and was buried in an unmarked grave without ceremony. On 25 May 1946 the rest of the family was deported via the Kraslice camp to the American Zone in cattle wagons and in Würzburg they were disinfected with DDT. Their mother originally worked as a servant in a Jewish household which was awaiting the possibility to leave for the USA, their father painted pictures to exchange for food. In 1950 their parents had a second daughter. The family finally settled in Lichtenfels, where Margit studied to be a chemist and was married in 1961.
