Bruno Ertelt

* 1930

  • “There was an air-raid and a Russian airplane dropped down a bomb on a house, where they were hiding. The whole house was shaking, but the bomb did not explode. It fell down about a metre away from the house and if it had exploded, all would have been dead. So that was his second luck in the war, when he did not lose his life.“

  • „Father remembered how well the Czech miners in the Ostrava mines treated the prisoners. In the mine they gave them bread. They really did treat them pretty well. The father was gone for a year until 1946. We were getting ready for relocation and then people told us that the father was in the Muna camp and that he was waiting for us. So at four o'clock in the morning we went to Mikulovice with my sister and brought him food and some stuff. Then we went back two days later and our father was not there anymore. They told us that some guys had come in leather coats in the afternoon, put him in the car and drove him away. Mom almost faded presuming he got shot dead. The next day a certain lady came and said dad would be coming back by train. He went to look around the fields and came home saying that they also had an electric hatchery in Lipova, and how the Germans left that twenty thousand eggs got burnt."

  • "Our dad was in France, and a Frenchman worked here with us. Daddy once came back on vacation. The prisoner never ate at the table, but he received food. At that time, the Frenchman received a letter that his wife was living with another man. He was completely down and weeping. Daddy did not understand, but my father somehow calmed him down. Then the French left, and the Russians and the English came here. And that was quite a difference. Englishmen were nearby in the old factory and the Russians on the other side. My dad was then in Russia, and a Russian Kosta stayed with us."

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Supíkovice, 05.04.2017

    (audio)
    duration: 02:30:26
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

They stayed due to a chicken hatchery

Bruno Ertelt
Bruno Ertelt
photo: archiv pamětníka

Bruno Ertelt was born on 28 March 1930 in Supíkovice (German Saubsdorf). The vast majority of the population of the village was of German nationality, just like his parents. At the time of the pre-Munich crisis the family fled across the border to Germany, where they stayed for several weeks. During the war, his father had to enlist in the Wehrmacht and then fought in France and Russia, where he participated in assault and retreat battles at Moscow. In autumn 1943 he was released from the army due to health reasons at the age of forty-eight and returned home. At the end of the war his father still commanded the local militia Volkssturm. In summer 1945 his father was arrested and placed in the Domasov’s intern camp, and then sent to work at the Jan Maria mine in Silesian Ostrava. In 1946 he was moved to a concentration camp in Muna Mikulovice, from where he was to be transported with his family to one of the occupation zones of Germany. But the father was pulled out of the collection camp by men in leather coats. Yet he was not arrested, on the contrary, he was requested as a specialist to run the hatchery in Lipová. Ertelt, as one of the few local Germans, remained in Czechoslovakia. In 2017 Bruno Ertelt lived with his wife in Česká Ves.