František Severa

"Then the whole tirade started. People started poking around, saying [my mother] had no business being here, and neither had I. I was supposed to go to an orphanage and my mother to jail. They went to different doctors, I got these certificates that I was not fit to be transferred... But people wouldn't give up. Where I live in Rudné today, a major named Prokopec lived in the house behind. ours. He kept saying we had to leave, that Germans had nothing to do here, and this and that. Then another gentleman from Nové Hamry, his name was like an omen - Špína (Dirt). They were always poking around until it got so far that we were in Cheb. Then somebody thought it was impossible, so they sent us back again. But on 25 March, the last truck from Rudná left, carrying one more family. In the evening, at half past ten, they stopped at our house, and told my mother to packup because we were going to Germany together. They told dad that if he made any trouble they would take him with them and lock him up. My grandma ran upstairs, my sister was asleep, and she said, 'Elsa, come on, they have to go!' They didn't wait and left. By the time she ran downstairs, the truck was leaving. Then we got as far as Bergheim to grandma and grandpa's."

"All the Germans were deported in 1946, so my mother and her family had to go too although both her brothers had been somewhere on the Russian front; the older one was back home but the younger one didn't come back until 1948. Mum arrived in Germany in August; in Augsburg, in the village of Bergheim, where we eventually lived. But, as I say, it was a big love and she crossed the border back in Aš, illegally, and she met a lady who was coming back and said: Come on, let's go to the post office, send a telegram and ask him to meet you by the church in a week to see if he loves you. You can't go wrong with the church. Dad came, of course; he was working on the railway. He took mum and they went to Rudné together, and Mum would hide in her parents' house, which they got back. It wasn't taken away from them even though they were away because dad was a relative and grandma was the other grandmother's sister, so they got it and lived there. My mum hid there until October 1947 when it all blew up." - "Why did it blow up?" - "It blew up because my mother's water broke."