Gisela Rieseder

"My father's mother has her grave in Heřmanovy Sejfy, where the tomb is. And my daddy had a childhood friend who was then the mayor of Hostinné, to whom he wrote and asked for help because my daddy didn't have any photos of his mother. Today we can't imagine it at all. On the gravestone is the only picture that exists, and he wanted to have it at any cost. He said he'd pay anything. And the mayor of Hostinné, I don't know if he was a childhood friend or an acquaintance, made it possible to send the gravestone to Frankenthal, where my father lived and where he died. And now he is also buried there and he has his mother's gravestone with him. That's why there's a photo of the gravestone."

"During the escape, i.e. the removal, she had nothing at all except the clothes she was wearing. First, she tried to leave with a truck. It must have been sometime, I thought later, between the end of the war and August. That's when she tried it. She sewed gold into a teddy bear, loaded the car. Daddy was in the war, she was all alone, her parents were already in Bavaria, they had gone there earlier. And she stayed, maybe waiting for her husband. And she thought he'd come home from Russian captivity now. Anyway, she took the car and tried it with us two small children. The Silesian border is not that far from the Giant Mountains, what, thirty, forty kilometers? I don't know exactly. Anyway, they took everything from her and she had to walk back."