Kriemhild Zeh

„A new administrator came to the village. He was a young Czech, he could be around 30, his wife was in her early twenties.. They had a son, we played with him and my sister Sieglinde had to babysit him when the Czechs went out for a dance and the like. The administrator was rather a nice guy. He had studied economy and agriculture but he often asked my dad: ‘Mr. Rubner, how do you do this?’ He wanted to plant something but dad told him that it wouldn’t grow there. ‘Let’s try it.’ And eventually he would come and say ‘You were right.’ His wife was a young woman, she got on very well with my sisters. She kept asking my mom how to do this or that. And the young boy always said: ‘Pojď sem. [Come here]’ Those were nice times, I have to say.”

„The worst thing was, we had a dog and we had to leave all the animals behind. The other things… this was worse then those. And then they asked: ‘Why didn’t you take him with you across the border?’ But how were we supposed to do it? My father’s sister worked in Libá in a clothes store and both she and her niece had to stay until 1948. At the beginning, they would go to check on our house every two or three weeks... and then, the dog died.”

“I still have a letter written by my brother-in-law from Schirnding that they dynamited our house. That was really bad. His house was dynamited as well. And grandma’s. Dad just said so what, we’ll build it again. In 1946, 1947, 1948 , he was saving every penny so that he could go by train up to the border. Then he sat at the border, looking at the other side where his house had stood and cried. At that time, for me it was… I hit puberty and I was glad when I got to the boarding school where I never heard anything about this expulsion. It was bad for me and I suffered a lot. My sisters were not that emotional about it, they had their own families so it was simpler for them. Dad kept weeping, I wish it had not happened. And I didn’t want to hear a word about it. When Dad died in 1977, I joined the Landsmannschaft.”

"We managed quite fine. We had to live with the Czechs for a year but we had a good administrator. When dad had to stop working in the savings bank, a Czech came to take over his job. He told dad: ‘Pay the wages!’ Dad replied that it’s only the beginning of the month, that he cannot do it. ‘Pay the wages!’ He was a meticulous man. Two weeks later, there were no Germans in the savings bank. And the Czech wanted the Germans to get their money. So there were all sorts of people."