I cut up my mom’s food stamps
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Sieglinde Vaňousová was born into a Slovak-German family on 29 July 1937. Her mother came from Slovakia and her father was of German nationality. He was killed during the Second World War. Sieglinde Vaňousová grew up in the Sudetenland with her mother and little sister. She is a survivor of the events of World War II and the subsequent expulsion of Germans from the borderlands. She experienced the Hitler Youth marches and the bombing of Dresden. Some of her relatives were forcibly removed. She lived her whole life in the borderlands, trained as a bricklayer and then worked in Agroprojekt in Liberec as a technical draughtswoman, then in Tiba and later in Česana in Raspenava as a workshop accountant. She also worked for the company Interiér and finally worked in Textil kombinat as a seamstress and later as a saleswoman. In the 1950s, the regime did not allow her to marry a man who had Austrian citizenship. She had two children with him and he later emigrated to Austria. At the end of the 1950s she married and had a third daughter with her husband, Alexander Vaňous. She never joined the Communist Party. In 2024 she was living in Raspenava.
