We sang “Wo ist mein Heim?” and got along well with the Czechs
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Maria Stockinger was born on 9 September 1927 to a German family in Dešenice, her mother was Maria Weiss, her father Franz Aschenbrenner. She had three brothers and two sisters. Her childhood was spent with her grandmother, a midwife. She attended the elementary school in Dešenice, where she also learned Czech. She then went to the municipal school in Nýrsko and before going into training she completed a compulsory year of service at the Kraut family farm at age 14. At the end of the Second World War she witnessed the procession of women concentration camp prisoners through Dešenice. After the war she was assigned to work at a farm in Klatovy, but decided not to wait for deportation and fled early with her father and sisters around Ostrý into Bavaria on 8 February 1946. Their house was confiscated and their mother was deported during Easter 1946. Marie worked at a farmer’s for almost six years, later finding work at a textile factory in Bonfelden. In 1955 she married a German deportee from Czechoslovakia who she had met before the expulsion. Today she has two children and visited Dešenice with them for the first time in 1974.
