Two Czech soldiers came along, that week they were deployed to Fleky, one Saturday at noon with their bikes and suitcases they came to our house, each one had a gun. I can still remember we had a dog who wouldn’t let them through the door and they put a gun to his head. And then they shut everyone inside the room. Two uncles lived with my grandparents, but they were already at work. All our suits, linen, cameras and similar, anything you could think of, they stuffed their suitcases full and took everything. To us they said, sanctimoniously: “Your father is locked up in Klatovy, so we’re taking everything.” That wasn’t completely true. Then when they were finished, they unlocked the door and were gone.
A week later a man came alone. My mother didn’t know he was also Czech, otherwise I’m certain she wouldn’t have told him. He had a different uniform because he was a border patrolman, he had a different uniform than the army one. In fluent German he told my mother – you’ve had a visit this Saturday. She told him everything exactly as it had happened, which is what he wanted to know and that was it. The next day, when a policeman on a motorcycle and side-car drove up from Chudenín and asked her to repeat everything once more, that’s when she realised that the first person had also been Czech. At the time, can you imagine, in 1945 he submitted a criminal complaint against his fellow countrymen. My mother wanted to have the complaint cancelled at all costs, because she was afraid for our lives. But the policeman explained to her that wasn’t possible, the case was already running and would be finished. We had a maid and young people who knew the soldiers well. Meanwhile they had been transferred to Kdyně. And one fine day she had to go with that policeman to the training grounds and she stayed in the car and pointed out which of them it had been. From the car she pointed at the two, they were led out and taken to Klatovy where they were locked up. And then there was a hearing in Klatovy, that policeman drove out there specially for it, from what I heard one of them got two years and the other eight months. Did they actually sit out their sentences? Probably not. But that’s how the hearing ended. And through one Czech-speaking relative my grandparents actually got their property back, they picked it up from a nearby village. That wasn’t much help though, since it was the end of 1945 and in 1946 the expulsion came. So everything was left there and they lost it all again. But the fact that in 1945 a Czech citizen could file a complaint against his own countrymen breaking the law, that wasn’t something that happened often.
We were in Vorderbuchberg, it was about three quarters of an hour to the border for us. Round the back there was this hill where the view was good, Stammenruck. From there you could see bits of our homeland, all the way to Nýrsko. We were able to watch things changing – when they tore down a house here or there and so on. It was most dramatic in the case of the church in Červené Dřevo, it was a sunny day, I don’t know when exactly, 1954 or 1955. Either way they set it on fire to begin with. According to the papers the fire was caused by a magpie, you can think of that what you will. Nobody tried to put it out, that’s for sure. And two years later they blasted what remained to pieces and levelled the thing with bulldozers. Later on they closed the area as a military training zone and nobody was supposed to know that there used to be a cemetery or church there.
Those explosions, yes they were pretty quick. But that fire, that took a long time and the wind was blowing from the east. At any event the citizens from Jägershof told us that close to the church there was this small manor, the parish house. Inside there were old documents lying on the floor and the wind was blowing them over the border. Quite a terrifying story.
For a short time he came to Fleky illegally. He couldn’t ask them to release him to Fleky directly, because from the Czech point of view he was a deserter. He’d done his basic military service in Rokycany, with the Czech Army, but when the general mobilisation was declared in 1938, a number of Germans near the borders here just ignored the message and went to join the German Army. And that’s how it was back then, these people, when it was found out, well they didn’t have a long life ahead of them. So he was discharged to Bavaria and that’s why we had to say goodbye to our home so soon, almost illegally, because he wasn’t allowed to come there officially, because his life was in danger.
Friedrich Reithmeier was born on 14 August 1936 in the village of Fleky (Flecken in German) near Nýrsko, which was under the parish of Červené Dřevo (Rothenbaum) at the time. Back then, only German families lived in Fleky and the Reithmeiers were no exception. Karl, the father, trained as a cobbler, but in order to feed them he also spent time on the tiny family farm. The four-person family was squeezed into a three-room house with a closet for the father’s grandparents. While Karl served in the Czechoslovak Army in Rokycany, he failed to report for duty during the general mobilisation in 1938 and so was considered a deserter by the Czechoslovak authorities. He was enlisted in the German Army in 1943 and did not permanently return to the village of his birth after the war. Friedrich started attending primary school in 1942, which was a multi-age class school in Červené Dřevo where he also took First Communion in April 1945, on the day of the shelling of nearby Nýrsko. After the American Army left, Czechoslovak and other soldiers came to Fleky, carrying out acts of violence and theft. However in the specific case of the Reithmeier grandparents, these soldiers were convicted of the robbery and had to return the property. This did nothing to prevent the deportation of the grandparents several months later. Their mother left Czechoslovakia with the Reithmeier children before the transports began – in November 1945 they left to follow their father, who, as a “deserter”, was not allowed back into Czechoslovakia. Friedrich has stayed in the border town of Vorderbuchberg until this day. From there he watched the building of the Iron Curtain and the destruction of the former German villages, including the house of his birth and the parish church in Červené Dřevo. In 1989 the fall of the Iron Curtain came as a surprise, giving him the option to regularly visit his homeland, which he still has ties to. He has also volunteered alongside other parishioners to once more uncover the foundations of the church in Červené Dřevo and repair what remains of the local cemetery.
