Helmut Ulowetz

"So your family stayed in Czechoslovakia after the war?" "After the war my father went to work in the paper mills in Loučovice, and when the deportation took place, my mother was to be deported with us children. We were two children, my sister and I. But my father didn't get permission to leave. And because my mother wouldn't leave without him, we stayed too. We lived in my grandmother's house." "And the other relatives? Grandmother, mother's siblings, they all left?" "They were all deported. My grandmother and grandfather and the two boys, the youngest and the second youngest. And the other two were already in Austria for work and in Germany. So the grandmother and grandfather and the two boys moved to Germany."

"Monks were still living in the monastery at that time. Do you remember them?" "I remember a little, though not much. Because my mother went to church, I was an altar boy from the age of seven. One evening there was a mass in the church. It was already dark. Cars came and started taking all these monks away. So we had to leave the church through another door. I remember there was some movement, whether it was soldiers or someone else. We saw that. Then when it was all gone, we went with the parish priest into a big hall with books to rearrange things and clean up a little bit. We were altar boys so we had to help the parish priest. After some time it was sealed up, it was closed. There was a corridor behind the vestry and a garden in the middle. There were doors, both to the right and to the left. And they were shut. Then the foot soldiers took over the place."