“So Granddad returned home with the other soldiers. Granddad got to Svatoňovice – the train didn’t go any further. It was chaos everywhere, nothing worked. So Granddad, the way he was used to and knew how to – being a railway man – set off along the tracks on foot to Horní Adršpach. At the level crossing in Petříkovice, at the place which is close to the current state border with Poland, back then with Germany, he came upon soldiers who were starting to occupy the territory. Granddad was in uniform. Just to give you a better picture: he wasn’t tall, he was pretty small. So when the soldiers saw a soldier of the Czechoslovak army, they charged at him, knocked him down into the ditch, starting beating him up, swearing at him. Because Granddad spoke good German, he started talking with them, and that saved his life because the Germans hesitated for a moment, they heard German, which surprised them.”
“In the meantime the people were held in the local prison; they slept there and early in the morning, around three o’clock, they were awakened and told permission had been received, that they would be taken in on the other side of the border, where they would wait for deportation. So the people calmed down. Although – if I imagine the situation, they couldn’t have been too calm because they didn’t know where they were going, what would happen to them... So back on to the cart, they were taken away, taken to the place, split up into two groups. The graves were already ready for them, and they were shot there by selected soldiers who ordered to do so by their commander.”
“The story is very tragic, sad, and so at the time when I was growing up it was practically taboo and it wasn’t really allowed to be spoken about. Not until when I was in my late teens, in the late sixties, when our society underwent a general liberalisation, did I hear the whole story. That was around 1968. And as you know, that period of liberalisation didn’t last long, so I heard of the story and got the information but then the normalisation came and practically for another long twenty years it was spoken of only in whispers or not at all. Not until after ’89, after the Velvet Revolution, when the actual liberalisation came and these sad events began to be... people began to investigate the details, how it happened, why it happened.”
Miroslava Moravcová was born on 19 December 1950 in Teplice nad Metují. Her family lived in Broumov District for many years, but when the border regions were annexed by Germany in 1938, her grandparents were forced to leave. When her grandfather returned from the mobilisation, his wife and children were not at home - it took him several days to locate them in Pardubice. When the war ended they found a house in Teplice nad Metují, where they moved in and where the witness was born a few years later. When she was older she heard of how the local German inhabitants had been expelled from Broumov District and how in 1945 twenty-three Germans had been executed on nearby Beech Mountain. The perpetrators were never punished, and the story could not be openly discussed until after 1989.
