Dieter Piwernetz

I collected stamps. That brings back one very nice recollection. I was given stamps which belonged to my uncle, he died in the war. We always collected from two areas: old Austria, in other words stamps with Franz Joseph I and the first Czechoslovak stamps, especially the airmail ones, those were nice stamps. And we traded them amongst us kids. I also exchanged a few with some Czech boys I knew. After the war they came back to trade again. They walked in the room, took both my stamp albums, started shouting and ran away with the stamps. There was no justice. That was a big disappointment to me as a child.

Through the expulsion of the Germans, the Sudety Germans, I think the Czechs got rid of part of their culture, expelled a part of their history, expelled part of their economic success. They expelled part of themselves.

I didn’t pack anything. I had a few pairs of trousers and a few shirts, that was all. You see we couldn’t believe we were being expelled for good. We couldn’t believe that would be our future. We couldn’t believe it would be a permanent change. We thought it was just a temporary measure and that of course we would return. I remember my grandmother hiding the key to the wood shed in the kitchen cupboard and saying: “We’ll be back soon anyway.” My mother tidied up the kitchen and living room, also under the impression we would be returning soon. Nobody thought it would be permanent, and so we didn’t bring anything with us. Then we didn’t have enough clothes, only had a few cloth diapers for my three-month-old brother, no warm clothes for the rest of us, just whatever was on our backs. We didn’t even take any toys with us. I remember washing our linen in a stream every evening. We didn’t have soap, but we still had to wash it. Old linen, we didn’t have anything fresh. From time to time we got something, our mother would procure an apron or skirt from one farmer, I would get a shirt somewhere, here and there we would get a spoon or something. Toys? No, we didn’t take any toys with us. One thing I can remember – one evening we came to a farm where we sat in the courtyard, the farmers were very friendly and gave us something to eat. There wasn’t anything to play with there, no children. But there was a large trough in the courtyard, for the cows to drink from. I looked inside and couldn’t see any fish in the trough. But downhill was a stream. So I went to the stream and caught a fish and turned the trough into a fish tank. That was something to play with.