“They used to have cows, about three cows. My grandmother used to have a goat and a plough. The way people used to farm, cows were harnessed to a plough, they grew corn and of course they had to had potatoes, beetroot, just the simple crops. And my grandfather worked himself to death because he died when he was only seventy-one because he mined coal in the mines for twenty-seven years and then he came home and said: ‘Wife, pour me Prostějovská (hard liquor -trans.) and prepare a slice of bread with bacon for me, I am going to the field.‘ It was always like this, I really liked it. And they lived very simple lives from what they gained at home.”
“I have to say I did not feel that good the first day at school because I lived here on the hill in seclusion and suddenly there was a classroom full od children and I almost did not know who I was. But I had to get used to it, even though it was difficult. I must confess that I was not treated very well as a child in Dolní Sedlo because they beat me, pulled my braids, because I was half-German, half-Czech, and with the settlement… I understand the people because of what happened, but I was not to blame as a child. So, for me it was… Only then I think Grandma improved it. She went in there, she had Czech origin, so she always got it in order to make it good."
Annelies Schölerová was born on 21 August 1943 in Liberec. Her mom had a Czech-German origin, her father was a German-speaking farmer Ernst (Arnošt) Prade. The family lived in the village of Horní Vítkov near Chrastava which became part of the Third Reich due to the Munich Agreement. Witness´s father had to at first supply the German army and later he joined it and died on the Eastern Front. Witness´s mother had to move out of Horní Vítkov after the war. She took refuge at house of her parents in the nearby village of Horní Sedlo near Hrádek nad Nisou where Annelies spent a wonderful childhood. Her Czech grandmother had her enrolled as Anežka for school so that she protected her against problems connected to her German origin. She worked in the STAP textile factory in Hradec since she was fourteen, later she graduated from a business school and gained a job in another factory in Hradec called Vulkan. After the Velvet Revolution, she received restitution compensation for property confiscated from her family. In 2021 she lived in Horní Sedlo.
