"When we arrived at the orphanage, they put us in a huge room, it was glassed in and locked all the way around, with two beds and five children. The three boys slept on one bed and me and Sonia on the other. They didn't know what to do with us. We didn't understand a word they said. We had to try. Today, when I see how they try to teach the Ukrainians Czech, how they are being terribly mistreated, nobody was mistreating us. They threw us into the water, and you either swim out or you drown. If you don't understand, that's your business. I learned Czech very quickly, because the less I learned Czech, the more I was beaten. Because it was the kids who were getting revenge. There were not only Czech children, there were Polish children, abandoned, orphans, Russian children, different nationalities. We didn't get along very well there. And especially the Polish children were very bad. I was beaten like a rye by them. So you tried to speak Czech as much as possible."
"When the Poles attacked us, they kicked in the door. They came from the camps in those striped clothes, they came to take revenge. They did exactly what the Germans did elsewhere. They kicked in the door and said, 'Tomorrow it's your turn.' She put several layers of clothes on us children, tightened it at the waist with a rope, rolled it up so we wouldn't step on it, and all night we crossed the border to the farmhouse in Malé Poříčí. There we were taken in by the landowner, Mr. Langer, to whom we used to go to help in the fields during the war, and we were given bread and cottage cheese to eat as children when we helped. So he took us to one room and we stored everything we brought across the border there. And the Poles didn't come the next day, they didn't come until the next day. My grandmother stayed in the house, and when she saw them coming, she ran away. She hid in the bushes and watched what was happening. And when the Poles found out that we were all gone, that our cupboards were empty and that they had nothing to steal, they set fire to the house. Grandma sat in the bushes all night and watched them drink. They drank a lot, they were armed and they shot each other. Grandma sat in the bushes all the time, it was November. And when it died down, the survivors ran away, the dead ones stayed there, so my grandmother decided to ran to the station in Zakše. She got on a train and went to Germany. And she left the four children on their mother's neck. The children she'd taken care of all her life, she left them there, in Czech. If mom hadn't taken care of them, I don't know."
"There was a cousin on my father's side from one of my brothers, her name was Katerina and she was ten years older than me. I was nine and she was nineteen. She escaped from the front, but I don't know where she lived. Her family sent her to us because we were closer to Czech and in a secluded place, they wanted to protect her. She had a poison pill with her, sewn in her coat, in case someone attacked her, raped her, that she would swallow it. And when she was with us, the Russian soldiers had just arrived and they were completely crazy about her. They were always swarming around the house, and once they broke in, broke the door. Katerina escaped to the attic where we had hay. We had a kind of a decking over the stairs to the attic, you know from fairy tales, a kind of a board for the attic. And I was sitting on the board and Katherine was hiding in the hay. Under the board on the stairs there was a Russian soldier with a machine gun and he wanted to shoot up into the board that I was sitting on. Mom found out at the last moment, so she flew in and slapped him so hard that he dropped the machine gun. And when his superior Russian officer came in, she told him. I guess he must have known German, I don't know how else she would have told him, since we didn't speak Russian. We didn't see the soldier at all after that. About 14 days later he came to apologize and brought us bread. And my mother asked him where he was, and he put his fingers together and showed that he was locked up."
Rosemarie Špeldová was born with the surname Bensch on 14 April 1934 in the German spa town of Bad Kudowa (now Kudowa-Zdrój in Poland). Her birth certificate shows the Czech form of this town as Chudoba. Her parents were German, but her mother Anna came from a mixed Czech-German marriage, so she knew Czech. Father Oswald served as an ambulance driver during World War II and died in Odessa in March 1944. Mom was left to raise her daughter alone. In July 1945, her sister-in-law died of tuberculosis and mom had to take care of four more children. With them, her own daughter and her sisters, she fled across the border to the nearest Czech village in November 1945. And although she found a job right away, she could not support her five children. So 11-year-old Rosemarie Bensch found herself in an orphanage in Česká Skalica with her cousin Sonia and three other cousins. When her mother’s standard of living improved, she took her daughter into her home and eventually her niece Sonia as well. After the eighth grade, Rosemarie Bensch had to take a factory job as a worker because the family lived in very poor conditions. In 1949 she obtained Czechoslovak citizenship. In 1955, at the age of twenty-one, she married Vladimír Špelda, a year later they had a daughter Eva and two years later a second daughter Vladimír. After maternity leave, she worked as a seamstress until 1989, when she retired at the age of 55. She was widowed in 2016 and lived in Hradec Králové in 2024.
The family of Rosemarie Bensch's father in 1940 in Striegau, the older Czech name Strzegom in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship in the district of Svídnice
The family of Rosemarie Bensch's father in 1940 in Striegau, the older Czech name Strzegom in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship in the district of Svídnice
