“And now all of a sudden, they thought, oh my, there’s a whole lot of Germans left in the border region! Those who had some special skills, professionals, foremen and the like. And so, they issued the Dispersal Act to scatter the Germans from the border regions. They looked where they could find entire families and moved them lock, stock and barrel inland to work in agriculture. And as for us young guys, or even the soldiers returning home from POW camps in 1947… They could have stayed at home, but there was a shortage of workforce in the mines, and so they were sent down, too. I was an office worker and one day I found the summons waiting for me at home. It said: ‘Meeting tomorrow at eleven o’clock in the square, bring your own packed lunch for two days. You’re being summoned to work in the mines underground.’ And so, I went from an office job to the mines in Kladno and I spent five years underground.”
“We lived in our own house, and we already knew that our neighbours had been marched to the station at gunpoint. Seeing as four of us were working – my father, my sister, myself and so on – they needed to let us know at work that we would be banished, so that we’d come home. When we’d all gathered at home, mum and younger siblings were sitting on the edge of a gutter in front of our house, waiting for us. The actual round-up to the station had already finished and dad said, surely, we won’t run to catch up with them ourselves. The house had already been sealed, but mum had spread some linen in the garden for the sun to bleach, and so that was lucky, we gathered that, and a small hay cart which was luckily stood behind the house, and that was everything we had.”
“Here in Frýdlant, the war was about to break out and it was closer and closer. Our father was in Görlitz, and our mum had six kids on her hands, and what if there’s a war?! She picked us up – my brother Honza was only four months old, he’d been born on May 1, 1938, so he was still in a pram – and we crossed the border to Germany at Zawidow, that wasn’t a problem. But now this horde of people turned up at my father’s place, he had a single room, one bed, one table and three chairs, and now what to do about us?! The people around were willing to help, though, so they took me and another sibling in. And then out of the blue there was an announcement that emigrants from Silesia and the Sudetenland were not allowed in the German border regions. So, they dispatched a special train bound for the Baltic Sea. We arrived at Berlin, and Berlin is like Prague in that there’s a number of train stations, Berlin Bahnhof, Berlin Anhalt and Berlin Hauptbahnhof, to name a few, and you have to travel between them. This means they had a coach waiting for us on arrival of the train and this coach would have taken us to another train station. We children boarded the coach when suddenly someone said, ‘All of the Moudrýs out of the coach! There’s no space for the pram’. So, we got off, the last coach had gone, and it was almost night, and we were six children with their mother with nowhere to go. Then the Red Cross took care of us, and they allowed us to spend the night in the waiting room. And in the morning, they picked us up and dropped us off at Königs Wusterhausen, which was famous for its radio transmitter tower, about twenty kilometres outside of Berlin. They dropped us off in some village with a lake resort where there were empty construction workers’ lodgings. There were other people like us from Silesia there. We got our meals from the canteen on the village outskirts, which meant first we had to walk over there in the morning. And they wouldn’t dish out your breakfast straight away, but first we had to march and pay respects to the flag before it was raised and only then would we get something to eat. We actually had to sing a song we’d never heard before and didn’t know the lyrics to. That was our first encounter with National Socialism – all of us together!”
He was born to German parents on May 9, 1928, in Frýdlant as the sixth of ten children. His mother was a housewife, his father worked as a carpenter in Görlitz, a German town right across the border. In early September 1938, his mother gathered the children, fled Frýdlant and joined the father in Germany as she was afraid of the war. The family was relocated close to Berlin, where they stayed for a month. They returned to the border region after Frýdlant had been occupied by the German Reich. Two of the witness’s brothers had to join the German army, the eldest brother Georg worked as a cameraman for the production of German newsreels. On finishing his comprehensive school, he briefly worked for a local farmer, and then moved on to a warehouse in Frýdlant. At the end of World War II, he witnessed Frýdlant being bombed by the Red Army. He stayed on at the warehouse even after it had been taken over by a Czech national caretaker. His family managed to avoid both the wild and the organised expulsion, as they were part of the necessary workforce. In 1947, following the Dispersal of the Germans Act, he had to move inland and start working in a Kladno mine. He returned to Frýdlant five years later and soon after lost all his savings following a dramatic currency depreciation in 1953. He got a job at a Frýdland furniture-making company called Interiér and stayed for fifty years, first as a mere labourer, and later as a technical controller. He married a German woman called Erika. The marriage lasted forty-six years, although tragically, they lost all three of their children. From the 1960s, the witness was involved in assisting Germans to voluntarily move out of Czechoslovakia, and from 1989, he helped them seek for their roots in birth registers, as he was familiar with the German Gothic script. He guided tours of German natives of Frýdlant region and collected names of Germans murdered or deceased after the end of the war. He died in Frýdlant on September 15, 2021, at the age of 93.
The family of Moudrýs in 1942 when they gathered for one last time in their entirety (the witness is standing over his father's left shoulder next to his eldest brother Georg, who was working as a German newsreel cameraman during the war )
The family of Moudrýs in 1942 when they gathered for one last time in their entirety (the witness is standing over his father's left shoulder next to his eldest brother Georg, who was working as a German newsreel cameraman during the war )
Inscription on the German soldier's tombstone (quoted from Heinrich Lersch's poem The Soldier's Farewell):
Nun lebt wohl! Menschen, lebet wohl!
Und wenn wir für euch und unsere Zukunft fallen,
soll als letzter Gruss zu euch hinüberhallen:
Nun lebt wohl, ihr Menschen, lebet wohl!
Ein freier Deutscher kennt kein kaltes Müssen:
Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen!
Farewell, my friends, farewell!
And if we are to die for ourselves and the future,
our last farewell should be:
Farewell, my friends, farewell!
A free German knows not the coldness of obligation,
Germany must live, even if we ourselves die!
Für Großdeutschland * fiel vor Warschau
Hermann Schneider
18. 5. 1919
21. 9. 1939
Er ruht bei feinen Kameraden, fein Geist ist um uns!
He fell for the sake of great Germany just off Warsaw
He rests surrounded by dear friends, gentle spirit sourounds us!
Inscription on the German soldier's tombstone (quoted from Heinrich Lersch's poem The Soldier's Farewell):
Nun lebt wohl! Menschen, lebet wohl!
Und wenn wir für euch und unsere Zukunft fallen,
soll als letzter Gruss zu euch hinüberhallen:
Nun lebt wohl, ihr Menschen, lebet wohl!
Ein freier Deutscher kennt kein kaltes Müssen:
Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen!
Farewell, my friends, farewell!
And if we are to die for ourselves and the future,
our last farewell should be:
Farewell, my friends, farewell!
A free German knows not the coldness of obligation,
Germany must live, even if we ourselves die!
Für Großdeutschland * fiel vor Warschau
Hermann Schneider
18. 5. 1919
21. 9. 1939
Er ruht bei feinen Kameraden, fein Geist ist um uns!
He fell for the sake of great Germany just off Warsaw
He rests surrounded by dear friends, gentle spirit sourounds us!
Certificate of employment at the Frýdlant spinning mill for Gertruda Blaschkova, a German woman from Větrov (Ringenhain), dated June 12, 1945, which served as residency permit and protected her from banishment
Certificate of employment at the Frýdlant spinning mill for Gertruda Blaschkova, a German woman from Větrov (Ringenhain), dated June 12, 1945, which served as residency permit and protected her from banishment
Certificate of employment at the Frýdlant spinning mill for Gertruda Blaschkova, doing night shifts, allowing her to walk in the streets after curfew (following WWII, Germans were not allowed to leave their homes between 9 pm and 5 am)
Certificate of employment at the Frýdlant spinning mill for Gertruda Blaschkova, doing night shifts, allowing her to walk in the streets after curfew (following WWII, Germans were not allowed to leave their homes between 9 pm and 5 am)
The furniture factory in Frýdlant where the witness worked for fifty years (in those days, it was called Interiér and was one of 29 branches of a state-run company)
The furniture factory in Frýdlant where the witness worked for fifty years (in those days, it was called Interiér and was one of 29 branches of a state-run company)
The former building of the Czech school on Bělíkova street in Frýdlant, which was opened in September 1925. The street is called after Václav Bělík from Větrov, who in 1919 managed to push through the establishment of the first two Czech classes in the otherwise German comprehensive school in Frýdlant (nowadays Husova street primary school).
The former building of the Czech school on Bělíkova street in Frýdlant, which was opened in September 1925. The street is called after Václav Bělík from Větrov, who in 1919 managed to push through the establishment of the first two Czech classes in the otherwise German comprehensive school in Frýdlant (nowadays Husova street primary school).
The former building of the Czech school on Bělíkova street in Frýdlant, which was opened in September 1925. The street is called after Václav Bělík from Větrov, who in 1919 managed to push through the establishment of the first two Czech classes in the otherwise German comprehensive school in Frýdlant (nowadays Husova street primary school). Today just like in the past it houses the library.
The former building of the Czech school on Bělíkova street in Frýdlant, which was opened in September 1925. The street is called after Václav Bělík from Větrov, who in 1919 managed to push through the establishment of the first two Czech classes in the otherwise German comprehensive school in Frýdlant (nowadays Husova street primary school). Today just like in the past it houses the library.
A memorial plaque on the Czech school building to Otakar Kodeš, the victim of unrest in the border region. The teacher and school librarian volunteered as a member of militia ("Stráž obrany státu") and went to defend the neighbouring village of Heřmanice.
A memorial plaque on the Czech school building to Otakar Kodeš, the victim of unrest in the border region. The teacher and school librarian volunteered as a member of militia ("Stráž obrany státu") and went to defend the neighbouring village of Heřmanice.
