"The war ended on May 8. And on the 22nd May, I believe, there was Pentecost, and on the 24th or 25th of May a group of paramilitary Czechs came to Wichstadtl, and they had 10 men, 10 German men, totally white, all tormented. The mayor and the teacher, the head teacher, have been treated quite terribly, clothes stripped, and then, e.g. they burned his moustache with the lighter. And then they killed them. My father should also have been amongst them... All German men were selected, but only 10 were chosen. Shortly after, a German who was at home in the Glatzer Kettle, who had nothing to do with Wichstadtl, had come to Wichstadtl, because his wife inherited a house. He was already retired and had troubles with his hearing. Then he heard that my father was called, Siegfried Pausewang. He heard badly and thought it was Emil Pausewang, that was his name. And he's been beaten to death. A father of an SS soldier, a German father who could do nothing for it. He was also killed. Or a German, who had a Czech name Šafář, but he was German, he could not speak Czech. They have also killed him, because he changed his name from Šafář to Schaffer. And a German, who had an arm missing from the war, has also been killed. There were a total of 10 people. It is known where they were buried. They have already been excavated. The son of the mayor, who has the doctrinal title, and he has managed that his father, the mayor of Wichstadtl, that his honor was restored. And now, at Pentecost, there shall be an altar, where the dead are all lying."
"My father had a very strong sense of home, now we were back in Mladkov, and my mother noticed that if my father had still studied for two semesters at the Prague university, he could have become a primary school teacher. That would have been ideal for my father. He did not want to do so, he wanted to settle down. First he said, well then I do it. As a young child, about three-year-old, I was in Prague for a semester. But my father had a problem, as he had to learn Czech, as naturally an elementary teacher had to speak at least a little Czech. Has tried to do it, but he probably did not want to learn Czech, because he was incredibly nationalistic. When he noticed that he could not learn Czech, he went back to Mladkov, and back to my mother and I too."
"It was like this: my grandfather, who used to teach at this school, had three German school classes. It was still the Austria-Hungarian monarchy. When I went to school there was already a class of Czechs and two classes of Germans. But in the Czech class, there were many Germans, so the Czechs gave the German children, or all children from their class, a large package of winter fun, and because many Germans were very poor, they had their children sent to this class just to get this package. It was probably all done by the Czech government..."
"And after they were gone, she said, now we cannot stay here anymore, we have to flee. So we fled wildly, not like the Germans who were there later and had to go by train. We did it all on foot and as early as October 1945, we arrived at my mother´s sister's house. And for that very reason, it was like this: the mother escaped with us to the frontier, and there she lived with good friends of my father with us, but only for a week. Then she went with us. This one week she was also once in Mittenwalde, which is a German city, which was formerly also German, and there she saw that there before the Soviet city commander stood a long queue of women. She has also joined the queue and has learned that these women were bombed women who had no home. They wanted to go back to their area. There she glimpsed over and figured that there was a woman also from the West Germany. And with this paper we arrived later, in autumn and October 1945, back to the West Germany. And so I really know, what refugees are. Nine weeks on foot. That must have been about... eight hundred kilometers."
Gudrun Pausewang is one of the most renowned German-speaking children’s and youth book author. She was born on 3 May 1928 in Wichstadtl (Mladkov) in Czechoslovakia. Her father, Siegfried Pausewang, was the youngest son of the elementary school teacher in Wischstadtler, her mother came from Saarbrücken. The couple bought a property near Wichstadtl. Thanks to the father’s agricultural knowledge and the diligence and effort of his whole family, the Pausewangs succeeded in producing fertile land from the “Rosinkawiesse”. Gudrun was the oldest of six children. In 1943, her father died in Russia. At that time Gudrun attended high school in Moravian Schönberg, and she also lived there until the end of the war. On May 22, 1945 more than ten German men were tormented in Wichstadtl. Immediately afterwards, the mother decided to flee with her children. Their journey west-wise lasted over nine weeks and the families walked the whole path on foot. The Pausewangs have found their new home in Wiesbaden. Gudrun has become a primary and secondary school teacher. For many years she worked at German schools in the South America. She has written down the memories of her childhood in several books. For her book named The Cloud she received the German Youth Literary Prize in 1988. She currently lives in Baunach (Oberfranken).
