Christa Petrásková roz. Tippeltová

“It happened in Autumn, I did not have shoes and my mum wanted to take me to a Baťa shop to buy me shoes. The trams were packed all the time, so we managed to get to the tram trailer but the people pushed us inside the carriage between the standing passengers and my mum had already taken off the white armband when she saw that we were not in the tram trailer where the people with armbands were standing. She told me that we would not talk together but I did not obey her and asked her something. We were in a crowd and of course, I spoke to my mother in German. The people around us reacted immediately; there was a line or a belt stretched through the tram and when the guard wanted something from the driver, he pulled it which was a command to the driver to stop and the driver stopped. So someone immediately stopped the tram and they carried us out quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, they passed us around like a baton, like two packages, and threw us out of the tram between stops.”

“Our distant relatives, the Endlers, were living next to our house and they came for Mr. Endler that he had to go on a hunger march because it was such an activity that they wanted the Germans to experience the death marches. Well, he had not had to fight because he was a glass-blower and was necessary for the Reich and he kept on working in a glass factory. So he had to line up, they met in the upper square and he was to go on the death march. And his wife got up and went to drown herself in our well and there was such a tendency back then that people went to drown themselves in the dam when they were in crisis and could easily solve it. The dam was available.”

“I know when he joined the army, it was sometime in 1943. I was two at that time and it is one of my first memories. I was there when my parents were saying goodbye. It was in the evening the day before my father was supposed to leave and I was having a bath, my parents were crying and I joined them. I remember it and I got to know from his military identity card that his ambulance train was in Vienna around April 15th. I know from his narration of the story how he was wounded. The train was standing in the station and the Allies were bombing it and my dad hid under the carriage. He was peeking out and observing the situation, a strafer was flying above him and dad looked into his eyes and the strafer shot at him. So the bullet went through his shoulder. His head was injured from the shrapnel, but only the ears, his eyes were not injured, and as he was protecting his face with his hand, he also had some shrapnel in his left hand. People from the train who had survived or had only slight wounds were evacuated to Volary where a military hospital was at school. They walked there for ten days and were treated there. The Americans came there. The Americans then withdrew from the Bohemian Forest to Austria or Germany, and those prisoners who were slightly wounded or already healed were transferred elsewhere, but because my father was a Sudeten German, he belonged to the Russians. Part of the Sudeten Germans was transferred or transported to another POW camp in the Owl Mountains. And when they were released from the Owl Mountains in July 1945 he wandered again on foot and wanted to get to Bohemia via the Hrádek border crossing. He slept overnight in a village in Germany, in Saxony, and at the border crossing the Czechs detained him, and just like that, instead of letting him in, they took him to a prison in Pardubice, and if it wasn't for our good neighbour, a Czech, he probably would have starved to death there or died of some kind of hardship, because I don't know that from my father, but from another German who was in the prison in Pardubice, that they only got potato peelings and it was just like a concentration camp. "

There were forty-eight of us in the first year and our teacher had a lot of work with us because eight of us were Germans and we did not speak Czech at all so it was really difficult for us for the first six months as we could not answer or did not pay attention for a while and so we had to kneel. And I was often kneeling on the dais so I was paying close attention and in half a year I could speak Czech so well that I got a B on my report and from then on I used to get straight A´s and I grew fond of the Czech language and I like it a lot.”

“We were treated the same way as the Germans treated the Jews during the war. It means that we were second-class citizens. For example, we weren't allowed to ride the tram, as usual, we had to ride only in a tram trailer, and on the rear platform. And it once happened that my mum wanted to buy me shoes, so we wanted to take the tram to Jablonec and both the tram trailer and the rear platform were full. So my mum decided to take off the white armband which had “German” written on it and we got on the tram. My mum had ordered me not to speak. However, I asked my mum something in German and someone immediately stopped the tram and they literally carried us out, threw us out of the tram and the tram went on going.”

“In 1968 I, like all people here, experienced moments of huge excitement, the door to the world opened. Everyone who could, started to travel immediately, so I set off for Vienna to see my husband who had gone there for computer training. I got the visa to all the world states for twenty-four days so I could go to Vienna and back. And then I set off for the Netherlands and when I was returning there were already rumours that our beautiful new freedom would not be permitted by the Russians. Which was confirmed when we could see planes one night. The planes were flying the whole night so we thought that those were some manoeuvres but those were Russian planes landing in the airport in Boleslav. We turned on the radio in the morning and they were reporting that we had been occupied.”