Herbert Wagner

"The deadline was the 1st of August, 1946. My parents learned this three days beforehand. All of their furniture was already gone, except for the kitchen, which they left behind. They had to gather at a specific time and place with a maximum of 50 kilograms worth of luggage which each of them had to carry themselves. Articles of value had already been… they had to report them already beforehand, hand them over “for safekeeping”, as it was called, and then all of it was gone. They came to this meeting point, were then brought to a reception camp in Schobritz. And from Schobritz via Dittersbach, I think, in goods wagons. Anyway, they came to the Soviet occupation zone in Bad Schandau. There, they had to switch trains. In this process, some of the food they carried was lost. This is how my parents and their middle son were expulsed. The older son lived with his paternal grandparents. They had already been expulsed or moved out or deported, however you want to call it, a few days earlier."

"Well, what happened to the house? One apartment was vacant, so a trustee, a Czech woman, came and showed a certificate: she is the trustee and will move into the apartment. From then on, my parents had to pay rent in their own house, to the národní výbor. The trustee, what things she needed, she took from my parents, gave them… kept them as her own property. Then, another family came, or another woman, and claimed my parents’ apartment. So my parents had to move out of the house. The… the furniture of one room, they already had to give to a chipboard company, so the entire furniture came to this furniture company, I’d say, was taken there. And the trustee took the other room, so that only the kitchen was left. My parents took the kitchen and moved to a house nearby. In this house, two Czech families lived, as well as a German woman. In the house, they got along well with the Czechs, who were friendly to the Germans, even gave them something to eat. But on the streets, they were not allowed to know each other."

"And well, things that she talked about were what her younger brother told about the eastern front. The younger brother had just graduated from high school and was drafted. Actually, he wanted to study theology but was sent to the eastern front and said that horrible things happened there, at the eastern front. He said, “If… We have to win the war. Because if they do to us, what we did to them, we will truly suffer.” Another… A brother-in-law however was quite different. Before the occupation of the Sudetenland, he was drafted to the Czechoslovakian army, was stationed in the Bohemian Forest at the border. He deserted with a few fellow comrades because they did not want to shoot Germans. After the annexation of the Sudetenland, he returned, was then drafted to the Wehrmacht, and sent to the eastern front. He was convinced by the National Socialist ideology and said to my mother, according to her, “The last bullet is for me.” How it would have been, we don’t know. He was in Stalingrad… was seen last in the area around Stalingrad and declared missing. Same with the other brother, Josef, of hers, the younger one. He is… was declared in… was declared missing in 1945 in Romania, in ’44 or ’45."