They had to go, everyone had to serve somewhere else. Some people treated them nicely, some were also cruel. They had to go to whoever requested them, from the camp. My mother told me that they were painting apartments somewhere, so they had to go there to clean up, with another lady. So the gentleman, the lady was not at home, so the gentleman, my mother said that they had very good food from him, which they took away. They were not used to greasy food and they were served pork, dumplings, cabbage. Mom said, 'I ate a lot.' The other lady said, 'I'll eat when I'm done.' But the master's wife came home and she got nothing. On the one hand, one is not surprised that the hatred was present, but they did not be so unselectively hateful to everyone. "
"So he ran away and up there, where there is such a recreation, it was always Kynast, there he was caught. He had to take off his shoes and they drove him to Tanvald in court and locked him up there. But I say - he was very kind to me, we went there to go shopping for him, and I always thought he was angry that I had pigtails. I remember that, but he was very kind. "
"Dad was down there in the basement, too. But I also wanted to say, it was quite nice, we still lived with Mr. Havlíček in Jablonec and the more men were locked up here in court in Tanvald. They took them to Harrachov by some truck to the forest to work, so they were guarded, but we could go there illegally with them. And no one who guarded them, those prisoners, had anything against them. On the other hand, they were great people. If we were there once or twice, but my dad and I met. They also knew that we were Germans, that they were Germans, and again they behaved completely differently. It depends on how one behaves, it's not nationality, it's how one behaves. "
"Well, because in that room, maybe there were fifteen of us. Maybe even more, with the kids. Bunk beds too, we slept upstairs as children. They gave us a small stove there, I remember, but there was no wood. It was irrigated a little in the evening, but in a moment the wooden one was blowing, and all the heat was gone. My mother took the duvets with them, they were such wooden boxes, and the address was written on them. You take one duvet and box is full. We had two duvets, a pillow, something on top of each other. There was a suit and shoes for Dad to have something if he came back. "-" You said you didn't even have a lot of your childhood photos? "-" I don't. "-" It was a consequence that you couldn't… " - "We couldn't take it. When we came back, we went to see our houses as children and there was nothing left. "
"Well, since we didn't go to school either, we had two years of vacation, as Verne wrote, so I was eight, almost nine, when I went to first grade again. I still went to the first class in Jablonec, I also started the second. Then Dad was let go and he went to it and he started grinding into it and we came back here. I also like to remember him, I don't know his name, he was the school principal and he took care of us and taught us Czech. First one learns to swear. But there was also a teacher, and when you couldn't say it, you were slapped. That's not good, this, the kids aren't to blame at all. "
Charlotte Scharf was born into the family of Emil and Anna Brückner on November 9, 1938. They lived in Albrechtsdorf, today‘s Albrechtice in the Jizera Mountains. Father Emil was born in 1891 and did not have to go to the front, since 1944 he supervised the prisoners in the camp next to the Schowanek factory. The father of the future husband of Charlotte Scharf fell near Kharkov during the war. During the war, the witness saw the Reich SS leader Heinrich Himmler in Albrechtice. She remembers the frequent flights of Allied planes and hiding in shelters. After the defeat of Germany, Soviet soldiers passed through Albrechtice, they did not harm the Sudeten Germans, unlike the Czech Revolutionary Guards. The witness‘s father was sentenced to three years in prison after the war. In November 1945, his wife ended up with seven-year-old Charlotte and her three-year-old brother in a concentration camp for displaced Sudeten Germans in Rýnovice near Jablonec. Charlotte Scharf experienced winter and hunger there, hearing the cries of tortured Germans. The family avoided deportation thanks to their mother‘s work in an inn in Jablonec nad Nisou. The witness began going to school after a two-year break, at first she did not speak Czech at all. In 1948, their father was released from prison and the family returned to Albrechtice. Her father died soon after. After primary school, Charlotte Scharf immediately went to work at the TOFA factory to help her very poor family with her earnings. She married in 1961 and had two children with her husband Emil. She left the factory and worked for 25 years as a caretaker in a holiday cottage. In 2022 she lived in Albrechtice in the Jizera Mountains.
Charlotte Scharf's mother, Mrs. Brückner (third from bottom left); the film shows employees of a restaurant in Jablonec nad Nisou, where she worked after the war
Charlotte Scharf's mother, Mrs. Brückner (third from bottom left); the film shows employees of a restaurant in Jablonec nad Nisou, where she worked after the war
View from Albrechtice to Bukova hora, below it the Schowanek factory, where weapons, additional fuel tanks for aircraft and models of equipment for the German Air Force were produced during the war
View from Albrechtice to Bukova hora, below it the Schowanek factory, where weapons, additional fuel tanks for aircraft and models of equipment for the German Air Force were produced during the war
