Richard Hofmann

“There were mostly scattered farms. When the inhabitants were forced to leave, people looted whatever was left. At first there came the first wave, the real ´gold-diggers.´ They stole whatever they could. Then there were others, who settled here. Some of them remained, some of them left again. The larger villages, like Zhůří, became immediately repopulated. There were already the institutions, the national administration, they had a policeman there... But when the Army Forest Administration took over it, they created a military zone here and everybody had to move out. All of the houses were torn down.”

“There were some exceptions, some people remained. For instance here in Mokřany there was certain Fajt, then there was Mr. Stadler in Horní Kochánov who lived between our place and Keply, and the Šmíd family who lived over there above us. The first two were both Germans, the Šmíd family was a Czech wife and a German husband. They have remained here. But most of them were forced to leave.”

“A school used to be here in Mokřany. That day I was grazing cows in the valley there, a short way down the stream. At that time, nobody know that they were going to destroy the place. They blasted the place. They simply blasted the school building. I was lying on a path between fields, and all of the sudden there was a terrible blast. I saw school desks turning around in the air over the forest. You know, those old green school desks, each for four children. The desks were flying toward the forest and rotating like propellers. Stones began raining down... I was running to hide in the forest so that it wouldn’t hit me. The debris was flying so high and so far. There were terrible explosions. Allegedly, they had the building explode, because saboteurs and those who were crossing the border illegally used it as a hiding place. Therefore they destroyed it this way.”

“When the front was withdrawing, he ended up in Nuremberg. His hair turned gray during an air raid he experienced there. He told us that there were massive air raids. He ran to hide in a shelter. But inside the shelter there were already some Polish women and German soldiers. They had no use for him, and they told him to go away. When he didn’t know what else to do, he jumped into a sewer. He said that it was a horrible experience. The earth was shaking, buildings were collapsing everywhere around him... His hair turned gray during this air raid. But eventually it turned out that he was very lucky that he had not gotten into that shelter. When he got out of the sewer, he just saw people pulling out bodies from that shelter. All of them were dead. The shelter had not been hit, but a bomb exploded next to it, and the blast of air ruptured their lungs. They had no injuries, only their skin was yellowish. He said that he had been so lucky, because if they had not told him to go away, he would have died in that shelter.”