"Those people more or less did not care. You know, every time someone new comes in, they promise all sorts of things. And they even gained favour, but then it turned out they are dictatorship and murderers... Of course, people were very careful not to get into a concentration camp or get into trouble. And I am sorry to say that our competitors, I will not name anybody, would have been happy to see my father disappear, and they slandered him. The Gestapo used to come to us too. They were polite, beautifully dressed, but they also asked me: 'Is not your father listening to London radio too?' This way they used to catch people”
"It was that most people did not speak German. People who sympathized with it to some extent unfortunately confused Germanness with fascism, which was a big difference. When we became part of Germany, many had great difficulty, for example, to adapt in school and learn German."
"We were bilingual at home, Czech and German, but more so in German. My father encouraged us to do that because we had a lot of relatives in Germany and they could not speak with us in Czech, so we had to learn German. And my mother spoke to us mostly in po naszymu [Cieszyn Silesian dialect – trans.]. That was the main source of speaking."
Erich Weigel was born on 26 February 1929 into a wealthy Catholic family in Kobeřice in near Hlučín. The Weigels owned a general store, a delicatessen and a restaurant there. Before the war they had already established the first petrol station in the village. After the annexation of Hlučín region to Germany in 1938, they became German citizens. One of the witness’s brothers had to enlist in the Wehrmacht. At the beginning of 1945 he fled with his father and the other brother to the Protectorate from the approaching front. They found asylum in Újezd near Uničov, where they lived to see the end of the war. After 1948 the communists closed their pub, confiscated their shops and their house. After graduating from high school, Erich Weigel had to enlist in the Technical auxiliary battalions, where he worked on various construction sites in Bohemia. He studied mechanical engineering in Brno. He worked in the Ingstav construction company in Opava. In 2021 he lived in a family house in Opava-Kylešovice. He died in 2022.
