Lydia Němcová

* 1944

  • “One time some taller girl kicked me, to put it plainly, right in the ass. Her reasoning was that I am a German and her uncle had died in Auschwitz. This is scarred in my memory. I walked up to them, because she had a younger sister who I had become friends with. She kicked me and told me to get lost. I heard it all of the time, that I was a German. I don’t feel like a German. Mom was French and Dad applied for Czech citizenship after the war. The republic was founded in 1918, Dad was born in 1915. He had both Czech and German educations. So then, what was he? And what am I? There have been many times when have people asked me this. I myself don’t know what I am.”

  • “Dad didn’t have anything and Mom came with two suitcases. She just had her personal belongings there and she always said that she had taken three spoons, three forks, and three teaspoons and one knife. And Dad didn’t even have proper clothes to wear. Grandma gathered feathers in the bunker somewhere and made them a comforter. Mom used to say that there was something hard in the comforter. One day she opened it and there was a bullet from a machine gun in it. We kept it at home for a long time.”

  • “When I moved here I only spoke German and French. At home we spoke only German because Dad spoke only Czech and German, and Mom only French and German. After the war it was forbidden to speak German. So, Mom, who couldn’t speak a word of Czech, began to have a lot of problems. She had to do her shopping in German. And she even had a bad reputation for it. I don’t even want to repeat the things they called her. There were a lot of displaced people here, Volhynian Czechs or people from south Moravia. Only a few people from here stayed behind. And there were always problems.”

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    v Sudicích, 09.05.2019

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Being labeled German made my life miserable

Lydia Němcová, circa 1962
Lydia Němcová, circa 1962
zdroj: Archiv Lydie Němcové

Lydia Němcová, née Dastig, was born on 23 February 1944 in the city of Amnéville in France. Her mother was French and her father came from Sudice na Hlučínsku. Her parents met in the barracks in Thionville, a city under German occupation after France’s capitulation in 1940. Lydia’s mother helped in kitchen there. Her father, a butcher by trade, who had to be drafted into the Wehrmacht, was in charge of the barracks canteen. He was sent to the Russian front following his wedding. At the end of war, having returned to Sudice, the Czechoslovak authorities would not permit him to travel to France, so he convinced his wife to move to him, their daughter in tow, which she did in 1947. Lydia did not speak Czech and spoke with her parents in German only. The family had a tough position living in a village whose majority of original inhabitants had been expulsed to Germany. Because of her origins, she was not even accepted into trade school. She performed about five years of heavy labor on constructions sites, and afterwards she made a living as a store clerk. She is retired and lives in Sudice.