Politicians are not to be trusted, that’s how I was brought up
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Waltraud Benová was born on 21 December 1936 in Varnsdorf. Both her parents were German. She grew up together with her mother and her two siblings in Jiřetín pod Jedlovou. Her mother’s name was Marta Görner, née Salomon, (1908). Her father Ignaz Görner (1909) was killed as a Wehrmacht soldier in 1942 at the front near Kiev. Her mother worked in the Ignaz Richter textile factory in Dolní Podluží and her father originally worked as a bricklayer. After the war, Waltraud Benová was supposed to start primary school, but the headmaster did not accept her as a German waiting for deportation. In October 1946, thanks to her mother’s repeated requests, she finally entered the school. Her family did not have to join the removal because no one could be found to take over her mother’s hard work in the factory. All other relatives were gradually moved to East Germany near the border. After primary school, she was admitted to a three-year medical school. When she was nineteen, her mother died. She married in 1959 and had two daughters. She worked all her life as a nurse, first at the district doctor’s office in Dolní Podluží, and later in the internal medicine department at the hospital in Krásná Lípa. At the time of recording in 2025, she lived in Studánka (part of Varnsdorf).
