Egon Wiener

"They thought my grandmother should be sent to the square like other Germans with a white armband to sweep the sidewalk and so on, which was what was happening at the time. Grandma did not convince anyone that the boy who was there was a hidden child, or that she was the mother of those who fought against Germany. And those Czechs behaved shamefully. They behaved in such a way that they forced my grandmother to do jobs that she would not have had to do after the liberation, but as a German she was forced to do them. In the summer of 1945, everybody met in Prague, whether it was grandfather Arthur, father’s brothers and father. They came to Hrádek at a time when grandmother was being humiliated and those who forced her to do jobs that were not hers scored an own goal. My relatives stepped out of the jeep wearing battledresses, the uniforms of foreign soldiers, and stood in front of the house where they were greeted by the Czechs who had taken over the pub. The relatives asked after my grandmother and were told that she was doing what Germans should be doing today. Scrub the toilets and other things they actually wanted us to do, they have to do today. It was such a blatant way of revenge for the Czechs who used to be humiliated. The relatives got out of the car and called all the people who humiliated my grandmother because she was German, and she told them that it was actually her children and her husband who came to Hrádek in those two jeeps. And that it is not really about whether she speaks German and has a German surname. And what happened was that the two uncles forced the two former Czech Ostarbeiters to leave in just their shorts and walk to the station. The relatives had a locomotive and a carriage shunted here and sent these shorts-wearing would-be Czechs home, saying that they did not get any of the Germans' gold or hidden valuables. They went away and probably never forgot in their lives the way they had been taught how to behave as human beings."