“What can I say about the camp? We didn’t do anything. We received food. We could wash our clothes there, we had a room for ironing, we had everything. We didn’t take any bedding with us. Something was provided there. The only thing I remember was that I was knitting tablecloths there. This was in fashion at that time. And some sweaters, too. We went to a fair with one woman and we sold them there. Those who didn’t want to do anything did not have to. We didn’t have anything for the whole year, no money, just food. We were in the camp. There was one lavatory and a queue in front of it. We had assignments, like taking turns in cleaning the hallways. There were more buildings, because there were three hundred people there.”
“My son Lojzík. Teacher Karger stopped by and said: ´You are making mistake. Why don’t you speak Czech with the boy? He will start going to school next year and he cannot speak Czech.´ We thus started sending him to kindergarten one year before going to school. Then we went for the registration to the first grade. Teacher Čermáková said: ´Lojzík speaks Czech better than all the other children. Not even the Czech children can speak Czech so well.´”
“Slovak people were still searching. Turning over the stones. Many things had been hidden there. They did find some things. (Did somebody bury some valuables there?) Many, many of them. At that time there were coffee sets or tableware sets for serving soup or nice glasses. We were not able to take that with us. People would thus put it in some small wooden box and hide it. In the forest or somewhere. Some of it was found and some of it is still there. Something will still be there. There was one woman, I think she is still alive. She was with the Werwolfs and then she was taken to Russia. But she was here and she said that they had gold and that they had buried it somewhere by those trees, but she didn’t know the exact place anymore. But her parents did hide something there.”
“My mom had a heart attack. She came from the church and she dropped down and nobody could help her anymore. Mr. Lux gave her first aid, but she was already dead. I was waiting for her and I didn’t know that she died. I learnt only later, when they brought her body home. It happened a hundred metres from our house. Dad held me in his arms and told me that mommy… There were other people and they were telling him to go away with me so I that I would not see it. It was in January. Snow, winter. They carried the coffin on a sleigh to Skorošice. It was bad afterwards. Our life was difficult.”
Ela Hadwigerová, née Schubertová, was born on September 4th, 1993, in the village Kamenné (Steingrund in German) in the Rychlebské Mountains. Her parents were German nationals. Her mother died when Ela was six years old. At the end of the second world war, her father, who was fifty-one at that time, had to join the Volkssturm. The family was assigned to do forest work after the war, and therefore, they were not included in the deportation of the German population from Czechoslovakia in 1946. They were thus one of the last inhabitants of the mountain village Kamenné, which was demolished in 1961 by army “sappers” and now only stone mounds, fruit trees, old linden trees and a large wooden cross from the only reminders of its existence. All their friends and relatives left, and the family thus requested deportation from the authorities. In 1951, they packed all their personal belongings and traveled to the regional assembly centre in Liberec, from which there they were supposed to continue to the Federal Republic of Germany. However, they were not included in the deportation and spent twelve months in the camp. Her father died of cancer shortly after their return to the Jeseníky region. The family eventually moved to Nýznerov. Ela died in 2016.
