“A large picture hung on the wall in our house, and there was my grandfather leaning against a rifle. My grandfather was killed in the First World War. One day, my brother opened the door and said: ‘Perhaps the same journey like my grandpa’s awaits me…’ And it was so: my brother died in Russia as well.”
“I remember that I went to Výspa, where Volhynian Czechs lived at that time, to ask whether they had potatoes. Some young man told me that he did have potatoes and that he would give me some. But his mother told him: ‘Well, you know, but what about our pigs?’ And he replied: ‘People come first.’”
“There is a song from Výspa, which says: ‘There was a feast and there was so much fun that they made an ox sit on a merry-go-round. They baked something and – I still have to laugh when I think of it – it was raw on the inside and burnt on the outside, and they were so happy about it that they were running around the room. They cooked porridge with blueberries and they made it so well, that dad with a cane came there and children had to lick the pot clear. They sat in the village council until midnight and when they came to the pond, they saw that the moon fell down into the pond, and the mayor thus ordered the others to go and spread the news. They brought poles and they wanted to pull the moon out of the water, but since the moon would not stop in the sky, they were not able to get it out. Since that time, the people in Výspa village are rich: they have two moons: one in the sky and another one in the pond.’”
Marianne Šafaříková, née Tauerová, was born December 29, 1926 in Flussberg. Her brother Franz, a talented grammar school student who aspired to study medicine, was drafted to the army in 1942 and he was killed on the eastern front nine months later. Her father Immanuel, who was a prewar member of the communist party, received a draft order at the very end of the war. He was captured in Italy and he contracted a serious case of malaria while he was on the Asinara Island. Marianne was a vocational school student during the last three years of the war. In 1942-1946 she worked as a secretary and accountant in a textile factory in Plesná, later she worked in the acceptance department and in 1946-1958 she worked as a warehouse and expedition manager in the company Cremona. Eventually she worked as an accountant in the company Karma until 1988. She died in 2017.
