Inge Richtrová

* 1939

  • "Mum kept telling us that it was dad's birthday, we used to write to him too. We were always in touch like that, we were always living like that, both me and all my siblings, that we have dad, that he's alive, that we're going to meet. When I was a kid, I was about five years old, " I used informal language to talk to him or I remembered him, and then when I visited him, I even asked my mom: ‘Should I use informal or formal language, how should I talk to him? He spoke Czech… ‘Use informal, of course, you talked to him before, you called him dad, so naturally.’ We met again, but that was in '69."' Two of my sisters were there before me, before that, the government allowed it, or the state allowed it, and we were able to go there as siblings, that we had a father there. So I went there, it wasn't until the sixty-ninth year that we first saw each other."

  • "Dad fought, he went to war, his brother too, he was also from that village. After that, for a long time my mother didn't know anything about him, nobody knew much about how it turned out. Dad's sister went with three kids and she didn't know where she was going either, she didn't know about her husband and she didn't meet her husband, he fell, and our dad didn't fall. Then he got in touch, so he wrote to us, and we thought we were going [to the removal] in the autumn, but it had stopped. Mum had her suitcases ready, we could take what we wanted, it was allowed. And the ones before that just had little suitcases and they had to go. Mum could have packed a lot of things by then, but because they stopped it, a lot of those families stayed in the villages all the way to Moravská Třebová, a lot of those Germans."

  • "They [Soviet soldiers] drove cars and horses around the village, they went to families, everyone locked themselves in and didn't want to let anyone in. I also remember them saying, 'Davaj suda, davaj suda', my mother protected us. They used to take the men in a wagon to the meadow behind ours, that was just behind ours, I saw that as a kid, I was six or seven years old, so I used to look through the crack in the shed. They were standing there in a line, there were shots and they were shooting them. Then there was talk about it, my mother said it was the chairman and other guys that I perceived as a kid. Mum chased us away and didn't want us little ones to see it, then we didn't go back to it, mum didn't introduce us to it and didn't want to talk about it. They talked a lot of things among the women, but they spoke German in front of me so that I didn't have to know, otherwise it was only Czech afterwards."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Boskovice, 28.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:01:41
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I was looking through a crack in the shed

Inge Richtrová, 1946
Inge Richtrová, 1946
zdroj: archive of the witness

Inge Richtrová was born on 25 May 1939 in Slatina near Moravská Třebová as the youngest of four children to Aurelia and Rudolf Schvalb. Her father, a German national, had to enlist in the Wehrmacht, survived the war, but was unable to return home. At the end of the war, the witness lived with her mother and siblings in fear of the Red Army soldiers and witnessed the execution of local German citizens. The family prepared for the removal, but eventually the displacement of residents from mixed marriages was stopped. She did not meet her father until 1969, when she was able to travel to Munich to see him. After graduating from the municipal and burgher school, at the age of fourteen, the witness began working as a weaver at the Hedva Moravská Třebová factory. In 1957 she married Jiří Richter and they had three sons together, Jiří (1958), Jaroslav (1962) and Ladislav (1964). The eldest son Jiří emigrated to Germany in August 1989 and his parents were able to visit him at Christmas. After the death of her husband, Inge enjoyed travelling to Germany to see her family or to Scotland to visit her friend Marie Liszn (Byron). She is currently (2024) living in the family home with her son in Boskovice.