Maria Stockinger

* 1927

  • We sang “Wo ist mein heim, mein Vaterland” (tr. note: “Where my home is”, the Czech national anthem in German). On 28 October, that was Masaryk’s birthday. There was a large picture and we were all dressed up. And “Ob der Tatra blitzt es, dröhnt des Donners Krachen.” (tr. note: “Lighting over the Tatras”, the Slovak national anthem in German). We sang all that. That belonged to us back them. That’s where our home was, right?

  • Some of them already knew the way. I was crossing the border for the first time and I stayed on the other side, but others already knew the way. It wasn’t hard. There’s Ostrý, you can see that, so either to the left or the right around Ostrý we crossed over the border. We set out at night at eleven or half past.

  • Yes, they drove them that way. And with them was one woman from the SS. Mrs Kraut didn’t have water mains, just a pump. So Mrs Kraut told me to pump water, because they were thirsty. That was at the edge of Dešenice and they beat them, those SS women, beat their legs. They weren’t allowed to drink. And at the edge of the path they ate grass, because they were starving. They just wanted to go, probably over the border. Those were evil times.

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    Neukirchen, SRN, 03.09.2019

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    délka: 01:09:20
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The removed memory of Šumava
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We sang “Wo ist mein Heim?” and got along well with the Czechs

Maria Stockinger, Neukirchen 2019
Maria Stockinger, Neukirchen 2019
zdroj: Natáčení

Maria Stockinger was born on 9 September 1927 to a German family in Dešenice, her mother was Maria Weiss, her father Franz Aschenbrenner. She had three brothers and two sisters. Her childhood was spent with her grandmother, a midwife. She attended the elementary school in Dešenice, where she also learned Czech. She then went to the municipal school in Nýrsko and before going into training she completed a compulsory year of service at the Kraut family farm at age 14. At the end of the Second World War she witnessed the procession of women concentration camp prisoners through Dešenice. After the war she was assigned to work at a farm in Klatovy, but decided not to wait for deportation and fled early with her father and sisters around Ostrý into Bavaria on 8 February 1946. Their house was confiscated and their mother was deported during Easter 1946. Marie worked at a farmer’s for almost six years, later finding work at a textile factory in Bonfelden. In 1955 she married a German deportee from Czechoslovakia who she had met before the expulsion. Today she has two children and visited Dešenice with them for the first time in 1974.