"A Russian came to my dad and asked him for his watch. Someone told us that the Russians were after watches so my dad hid it in a closet where my mom kept a box of remnants… My dad had to take the watch out of his closet and give it to a Russian as he threatened him with a gun. He wanted that watch really bad. My mom had a watch as well. It was a small watch on a tiny chain from the old days. She would tie the watch to her snack basket so she would know what the time was when she was far in the back. She left that watch lying freely in the cupboard. The Russian knew very well where to look for it. He found it and it was gone as well. A story was being told in Králíky that one Russian took an alarm clock that was set and when it went off he shot it to pieces with his machine gun."
"They told us that we had to hand everything in. Every rifle, the radio, and so on. We didn't have any weapons at our place. There was this peasant who didn't want to give away his rifle because he wanted to keep it for hunting. He took it and went on a hill where he buried it in the ground to keep it for later. However, he was spotted by some soldiers who were looking in the countryside with binoculars. They saw somebody digging in the ground so they came to him and found the gun. He had to take a rope and they hanged him. The hanged him over there by the church next to that pub that had been repaired again."
"Before all of this was over, the war was being taken for granted. There were some soldiers staying on the field above our farm. They dug a hole in the ground and lived there. I don't remember how many there were anymore. They got bored and came to our house. They wanted some fried eggs or something to eat. But then, after they ate, they didn't want to go back to their hole so they stayed at our place. We would play some board games with them. Back then, we only had an oil lamp burning in the room and the light it was giving was very poor. You couldn't tell the green pieces from the blue ones. They would tie a ribbon to the pieces in order to distinguish them from each other on the board."
"There was a sort of a Marian column on our lands. It was because they had buried the victims of the plague there and then they built the column on top of the grave. When my parents bought the farm, there was a provision in the contract saying that the column had to be well maintained and kept on the estate. Therefore my parents would care about it. My mom put a wreath on it on All Souls' Day. The people who took our estate didn't care a bit about it though. They weren't attached to the column at all. They didn't know why it stood there and what it was good for. They didn't believe in God. They built some storehouses on the land and the column was removed. It simply disappeared one day."
"The Russians drove huge herds of livestock with them. They wanted to take the cattle to Russia. Sometimes I'm wondering if that livestock has ever made it to Russia. The cows had to be milked by somebody but the women were afraid of the Russians so the cows were hardly ever milked. This is how they spread the foot-and-mouth disease in the countryside. They introduced it to Červený Potok as well. We didn't have it at our farmstead but some of our neighbor's livestock became infected.
In order to stop the spread of it, it was forbidden to seize the German farms that were affected. Because of this, the Czechs living in the surrounding villages who wanted to seize the farms of the Germans who had been expelled were prevented from doing so. Then, when the foot-and-mouth disease was over, the Slovaks came and seized the remaining farms as the Czechs had already taken the other property and were no longer interested. So this is why the farms in Červený Potok were mostly taken by Slovaks. It was because of the foot-and-mouth disease."
Anna Vašátková, née Vogel, was born in 1931 in a little village called Červený Potok (Rothfloss in German) near the town of Králíky (Grulich in German). Both of her parents were of German extraction but her father had a Czech mother and that was why they weren‘t included in the deportation of the Germans after the war. However, in 1948, they were given 24 hours to leave their family farm and her parents were sent to labor in a mill in Rybná nad Zdobnicí, where they spent several months in very poor and crowded conditions. They were only allowed to come back to their native region in 1952 when the state-run collective farm in Králíky requested them for work. They only got their family farm back in 1994, but her parents didn‘t live to see this. At the time when the family was expelled from their farm, Anna worked at a farm in Prostřední Lipka. Once she stopped receiving meal vouchers though, she began working as a weaver in Orban Vamberk. Then she worked for the Hedva Králíky company and in 1955 she married Zdeněk Vašátko – a Czech. Today she lives in Králíky.
Great-grandfather and great-grandmother Joseph and Marian Hentchel with 8 children and their families (second from the right on top is grandfather Johan Hentchel)
Great-grandfather and great-grandmother Joseph and Marian Hentchel with 8 children and their families (second from the right on top is grandfather Johan Hentchel)
