Jan Rosa

"Then the last transport from Vrchlabí was leaving. Then, the camp was closed down, and my mother and I were alone in the camp again. Daddy was on a committee somewhere, repairing some cars. We had all our things straightened out in the cattle truck, and Daddy still wasn't coming. Mommy screamed that she wouldn't leave alone without Daddy, so they let her out, slammed the gate, and we stayed there with a few people. Where those people went, nobody knows."

"After the '48, Gottwald came to power and decided that there must be no Germans within twenty kilometres of the border. And so they brought a cattle truck to the station here in Hostinné, and we carried the things we had there. There wasn't much. And it wasn't ours, but some other Germans'. But now we had an advantage, we didn't have to travel in the cattle car but in a normal passenger car and left in the direction of Nová Paka. Nobody knew where we were going. I remember we were driving, and my dad told me to take one last look at the weir. And we ended up in Hradec in the Prague suburb, and that's where the cattle trucks opened up. And the peasants took us apart. Mummy was a maid to one farmer, and Daddy was a stableboy to another farmer. They gave us one room with a dirt floor and no bathroom. We had to go to the other house to get water."