Jan Moudrý

"At the beginning of June - my father, sister and brother had to go to work, nothing ended on 9 May - this gentleman came. He was not ashamed to walk around in his German uniform without any distance, he had found an SA uniform somewhere, probably to add to his importance. And he had a Revolutionary Guard armband, and he told my mother we had to leave the house in an hour. First, my older sister had to get my father and brother from work so they knew what was going on. In the meantime, Mother had managed to gather some clothes for the little ones for the pram and the ladder. Meanwhile, an hour passed before they returned from work. He still checked to see if he could use anything from what we'd packed. That said, we had no documents, historically, as far as official and property deeds, albums or anything like that, it was all left there. And we were on the street, and now what? It was past noon. Someone said that maybe there was some kind of camp for emigrants in Poustka, so we went there, but there was nothing like that. Someone mistook it for the original Russian prisoner-of-war camp that was there. So we came back in the evening, martial law was already in force, we were marked with white stripes, everybody had that marking. We weren't allowed to show our faces anywhere. Luckily, we had friends who at least hid us for the night."

"An order has gone out that children under the age of 15 must be evacuated to safety. What did that mean for us? Something unimaginable. We were four siblings under 15. A date was set. There was a transport on the outskirts of the city that was already carrying some children from the Silesian side of the New Town and a little over the border. We four children were given a tag with our personal details. No one asked the parents for their consent, whether they wanted to or not. It was just an order. Four kids. The eldest unmarried sister worked in the German youth, where they were given the task of being escorts in the transport. Nobody knew where and for how long, nothing. What an experience that must have been for our mother at the time. Four children taken away, unknown why and where, two sons were at the front in the war, the third sister worked here in the armaments industry, only the older brother, who was exempted from the draft because he worked in the food supply and the boss declared him indispensable, so he didn't have to go to the front at the age of sixteen. The four of us who were in the transport, I'll never forget it, standing at night in Ústí nad Labem at the western station. We stood there for a couple of hours, nothing happened. At that moment, my sister came running to tell us to pack up quickly, that there was a lorry over one of the tracks and our uncle from Ústí, who was the train driver and could probably have guessed what was going on, was on the engine. So he took us, loaded us onto a coal locomotive on a tender and took us all to Karlovy Vary, where there were relatives on my mother's side, so two of us went to one aunt's and two to the other aunt's."

"At that time, it was decided, probably freely, that there were skirmishes at the border, whether it was in Kodešovka or other places in Srbská, etc., so the time was uncertain, and our mother was rightly concerned about the future of the children when the father was de facto behind the border. It was decided that we would follow him. My mother put me in a stroller - I was the smallest at the time - and with the others, we crossed the green border at Habartice into German territory. We got - I don't know how - to Görlitz, where there were already more of these refugees. My eldest brother, then already eighteen years old, stayed at home to look after the house that was at that time abandoned. After that, we were already organized as a family without a father in Berlin, where organizations like the Red Cross were already working to take care of refugees. From there, they were to be sorted out into different agglomerations or regions that were willing to take the refugees. In the premises of the Berlin train station, the families were given a specific address and a destination. We arrived - I know this from the stories of my older siblings - we were assigned a bus and a line, and it was a double-decker, in those days, there were double-decker buses in Berlin like in London. Everybody had already settled down with the excitement of going to the Baltic Sea, they were excited, and it turned out that my stroller couldn't fit on the bus. The order came: the Moudry family back. We had to get out again and were transported by other means, probably trucks, to another camp about fifty kilometres from Berlin, where a former pioneer camp had been hastily converted into a refugee camp. The soldiers there cooked in the field kitchens. We stayed there, apparently until the Munich Agreement was signed and we were allowed to live in the town of Frýdlant without any problems. And that's what my older siblings blamed me for all my life, that they didn't get to go to the sea because of my stroller, that we ended up - in quotation marks - in such a stupid camp."