PhDr. Astrid Kostelníková

"You know what? This maybe, I can say this, probably this saved us. Because we were German children, even though we are from that northern Moravia. When the father was separated from us, the mother, 26 years old with four small children, got into one stream of refugees. So she went home to Liptov, but they rushed it. She had to go back in that crowd from before Vienna. Now, when I saw those Ukrainians, I felt very sorry for them, because I don't remember it, because it was after the war and there were no helping hands. Finally, they stopped us in Nováky, which used to be a Jewish camp. And then they stopped all this and closed it all there, and there it was selected who goes where. There, my mother was probably saved by the fact that the wise grandfather Hoffmann, a doctor, accepted Czechoslovak nationality when the First Czechoslovak Republic came. That is, when my mother presented identification that she was a Czechoslovak citizen, we did not go to the gulag. This saved us. And mom could talk. And there was a Russian who sorted it out. And mom said he was a good person. He sorted it out and my mother interpreted, because Central Europe was mixed at that time. And mom interpreted for two weeks. When the Russian divided them according to their nationality. Mom couldn't sleep because of this until the morning, because she knew who was cheating whom. And then, when they selected it, the Russian told mom that you will go home first. And another car for her ... And mom said that it's far from there with four small children. And she had nothing. The last thing she had was medicine. Mom knew that during the war, when German money stopped paying, even the gold she had, she spent it all on food for four small children. So she still had medication. And with those leftovers, you could also get food. Mom knew medicines because she was from a family of pharmacists and doctors. So she knew the medicines, her father was also a pharmacist. So this is how she got there, that she walked, somehow, she got home. At the beginning of June, at the age of 45, she knocked on the door in Mikuláš."

"Well, it was so loud, so loud at night, because they were going through Levoča towards Kežmarok, along the old road, between the woods. To get Kežmarok out of that side. Because there was an army in Kežmark, there was an army, there was an army. They went through Levoča, through villages, through Levočské vrchy. It roared, it roared terribly. That was something terrible. I was pregnant then, maybe 2-3 months. That's what I thought at the time: Jesus Mary, my mother experienced this and we will experience this too, this war. Because there were military forests in Kežmark and there was also shooting. They took the forests of Levoč and trained to shoot at the big planes there. So we were used to it, that they flew up and that they also shot and the shots could be heard. I know that they made it known at the time that no one should go into the forest, that there would be an exercise. So at first, when the planes started, but when the tanks started roaring, that was it. So I was terribly afraid that there would be a war. And I thought, my God, with three children, one on the way. And my husband and my father-in-law were still such that they would have taken even those older. What are we going to do? Our mother then called us on the phone, come to Liptov, big house, wonderful cellar. Both the house and the cellar survived two wars. We will survive there. I was very afraid, I was very afraid."

"The convoy stopped near the village and you could see that some houses were there. So, mother, she was going to get milk for me. It was already somewhere on the Slovakian-Moravian border. She brought the milk. She made it into mash for me. The three siblings so they looked like they were going to eat it. Mommy gave it to me because I was on the verge of death. I ate it and threw up everything. And they ate it all."

"We had very large rooms in Mikuláš. When it was colder, the children slept in one room and the cousins were there too. We slept together in the dining room on mattresses. That was an experience. It was May. I woke up at night and cried terribly. Mom came to see if I had a bad dream. I say yes. I dreamed about my father. That daddy came. I had a bad dream because dad came and didn't open the door, but entered through that door. He was like a ghost. Mom reassured me that he must have been thinking a lot about me. She wrote down the date. That was May 25. In October, the policeman told us that dad had died."