Ewald Seifert

"One night, it was already half past twelve, at the beginning or middle of December, there was knocking outside at our door. My mother, who was always fearless, she didn’t fear anything at all. She went out, opened the door, and there was an unknown man and said he needed a night's rest. That was my father. Ha was in France during war, got to American captivity in Normandy, up there where English and Americans were. He said the sky was black with loads of parachutes, so many came. He was at a PaK (anti-tank gun); out of fourteen men at the gun only three were left, the others were already dead. They took the three with them and sent them on a German freighter to America. And on their way they were still fired on by American or English airplanes, because it was a German freighter. There were six thousand men onboard. And then they had to work in American farms for eight months. Then they were driven over again on a ship, released in the Rhineland. My father did not know where they were. He knew that were were no longer in the old country land, but where we were, he did not know. We did not know whether he was still alive or where he was. Then in December he went to Steinach, which was a railway junction between Würzburg and Nuremberg or Treuchtlingen. Until then he was either driven or crossing the fields to Ohrnbach by night. It was a large place, he could not ask anyone where we lived, and yet he found us in the middle of the night."

“The day we had to leave, a soldier came by with a rifle in the morning. He knocked at the door with a rifle-butt, perhaps at half past six or seven o´clock, had a hand-written note, and there were many names listed. He read the names as good as he could read them in German. And when we were there, and in that case we were there, then we had an hour later to get to the Gasthaus Beitz, the biggest guest house opposite to the church. We had to gather there. Fortunately the builders, from the farmhouse number 40 where we were, they at least drove us with the carriage to the meeting place; otherwise we would had to carry all the boxes or pull them on the ground. So we were there in the morning, and I do not recall the date anymore, but it was sometime in mid-August 1946. I believe it was Thursday. In any case, we were there in the village square and the weather was nice, but it got hotter and hotter, and we were still standing there in the afternoon at four o'clock in the heat of the day. No one asked us whether we were hungry or thirsty. In any case, we were then driven to Niklasdorf with a 'wood gas car', with a truck. We were all sitting in the back and the Czech was in the front drove like an executioner under the trees and we almost crushed back there in the truck, as it almost turned over in the curves.”