“We were still at home, they said: ‚What to do with you? You should ask for a job in Amati.‘ I went there, I was already seventeen or eighteen and they accepted me. We made music cases. That is what I did all my life. There were Slovaks, Germans and Czechs. Everyone was saying something and I didn’t understand anything. I worked along with a Slovak and she kept talking to me in Slovak. I didn’t understand a word but she showed me. I understood. There was an old German from Sněžná in the storage and later he explained to me a bit. In time I got it. I retired from there and twenty five years went past so fast.”
“I came to Kraslice and here there were all Americans. At ours (towards Stříbrná) were Russians. At our house was a litter place, where people used to throw rubbish and they built a wooden cottage and lived there. They always walked around asking for something to drink. (Did you give them anything?) No! I didn’t know that, my sister told me: ‚When the Russians came, we put you in bed and covered you with sheets so that they could not see you. As you were big enough and they would take you with them.‘ Accordingly they said if they find any liquor and we don’t give it to them, they ´d shoot us. Well we had none at home, so...”
“When the Russians came, we were asleep, it was a dark night. The children had their window into the street, we had ours sideways. My daughter came to us: ‚Mum, there are cars driving past carrying soldiers.´ I replied: ‚So let them sleep and go back to bed.‘ In a moment she came again: ‚Mum, they are still passing by and they got guns.‘ We went to have a look and we saw they were the soldiers from Klingenthal. In the morning no one went to work, well we did, but were sent back home. (What did you think of it?) We were afraid what´s going to happen. They could have locked us up, shoot us, I don’t know what else...”
Aloisie Šmolcnopová, née Herkethová, was born on 21 December, 1930 in Kraslice in a purely German family of Emily and Richard Herketh. Due to mother´s illness she was raised by her godmother and aunt, but only until the beginning of war, when both foster parents were imprisoned for their political believes. The witness went back to Kraslice to her parents, where she spent war. The family didn‘t leave during displacement, as Richard Herketh was an expert for Amati excempted from displacement. The whole wider family had to leave including the foster parent of little Aloisie Šmolcnopová, who she never met again. Soon after that her mother died and the witness didn‘t have state citizenship, not the rights and could not speak Czech. The first post-war years were difficult for her, but gradually everything settled calmly. She worked in a box factory Amati almost all her life. A After the first, reckless marriage she had a second and firm marriage with a member of the border guard, Jan Šmolcnop. She had two daughters. In 1969 the witness became one of the founding members of the cultural association Kulturverband and then also a singing choir Heimatchor. He husband Jan died in 1986. Nowadays Aloisie Šmolcnopová shares household with Walter, her childhood friend. In 2016 she lives in Kraslice.
