Marianne Pasetti-Svoboda

“They behaved well in Doksy. There were no terrible things happening here, as we heard from other places. One night somebody was banging on our door. Mom started trembling. She told me to go to the attic and she and my fifteen-year-old brother went to open the door. There was a Russian soldier, and he only kept saying: ´колбаса! колбаса!´ Mom didn’t know that it meant a sausage, but she answered him in Czech, and that was also probably the reason that nothing happened to us. Later an officer came and explained to her that they wanted her to boil the sausage to make it hot. Then he brought some vodka and Mom and my brother had to drink with them. They both drank like crazy to empty the bottle because they wanted to leave as little as possible for the soldiers. The officer then dropped on the couch and fell asleep. My brother was watching him the whole night so that nothing would happen. He slept there and then he left.”

“I was born in Prague. All my family came from Prague. They were Germans, but all of them naturally knew Czech. When I was a little girl, I learnt Czech first. I think that even now my accent is rather Czech.”

“During the Protectorate, a border line was established on the railway between Prague and Doksy. My mother travelled to Prague several times and she would always meet one Czech woman who begged Mom to smuggle her suitcase, which was loaded with food. Mom was naturally glad she could help. At the end of the war this woman then wrote a testimonial about my mother, testifying that mother had behaved well during the war. Thanks to this, Mom was then allowed to ride trains after the war, which was otherwise prohibited to Germans.”

“Mom kept saying: ´I am an Austrian! I am neither a Czech nor German. I am just an Austrian.´ I can understand her, because she had grown up in a different state. But you should know that we loved President Masaryk. When he died, we followed his funeral in the newspapers and on the radio, and we cried a lot. We really loved him. But we didn’t like Beneš, however, because he was against Germans - he was opposed to Germans from the very beginning.”