“I told myself back then, I was the youngest, I was a child. I was going there without any preconceptions. Knowing I was born there, I thought it would probably touch me the least. But I was wrong. I came here to Benešov, to Líska, then to Česká Kamenice, I saw the church where my parents were married, I also saw my grandfather’s farm and suddenly I realised, Aha! Here are your roots. This is where your ancestors lived. This is where they built something valuable, lived beautiful days here, but also had worries and, above all, they’re buried in this land, yes, this is where your roots are. And so when people ask me, where is your home? – I have to answer them: I grew up without a home, I have no home. I’m at home everywhere and nowhere. But I have roots, I’ve come to realise that.”
“I don’t remember what I did there the whole day, my mother just said that I kept crying over and over, when she had to leave. The drove everyone off in the early morning to forced labour in the fields and woods, for heavy work and they came back in the evening. The only thing I remember is how happy I was to have my mother back each evening.
During the day I remember I had to stand in line for watery soup, because we didn’t get much else, that’s what I remember, but otherwise I don’t know how I spent my days. I keep trying to bring it up in my memory, but it doesn’t come, I don’t know any more.
Another thing I can remember, is how one day this lady from the forced labour brought me my dolly. I have no idea where she found it, in Líska or somewhere else. She brought me that dolly, it was my dolly. I just remember how that dolly supported me, even my mother confirmed it, she said that I stopped crying as much from then on. Because I had my dolly back, that was a great support for me.”
“I don’t remember how we got onto that hay cart. But what I can remember, is how we sat there like sardines on that cart and they drove us to the camp. After we arrived, I know we went to a huge factory building, there were metal beds there one next to the other, there were an awful lot of people squeezed in there. And another thing I remember, is that at night patrols with machine guns walked past and shot around and in the morning I heard the women say – him and him are dead and he’s dead and that one’s dead.”
In 1940, Sieglinde was born to the German Wintersteiner family in Benešov nad Ploučnicí near Děčin. Her mother Hedwig was from a farm in Líska u České Kamenice, her father Maximilian was a teacher, during the war he headed a German school in Benešov, which was a Czech school before the annexation of Sudety by Germany. Ms Vendolsky’s mother stayed there with her children even after her husband was called to serve in the war in 1943. As early as May 1945, they had to leave, temporarily moving to her mother’s parents’ in Líska, thus avoiding the wild expulsion. The mother and her children were soon placed in the nearby internment camp of Rabštejn, presumably because their father was a Nazi sympathiser. The Rabštejn camp was established during the war, when forced labourers and POWs worked in the local aviation factory. Little Sieglinde only heard about the torture and deaths in the camp second-hand, she found comfort in her dolly, which she has to this day. Her mother was lucky to survive a serious illness. The family was expelled to Germany in the spring of 1946, to the American zone in Hessia. In 1961, Sieglinde married Ivo Vendolsky, half Czech and half German, a witness of the wild expulsion from Czechoslovakia into what became the GDR, from where he emigrated to the West. Sieglinde graduated from business school, studied languages and then worked as a secretary. In the past few years, she has participated in events remembering the history of the Rabštejn before and after May of 1945.
