Leante Janderová

* 1930

  • “They beat up my dad, in 1945 they beat up every German, whoever walked by – they beat him up. So, they brought us this pile of human flesh…just threw him in the hallway. Mum took him upstairs and treated him there, we didn’t see it as we had been hiding behind a chimney, we couldn’t go there. And how the people were… the owner of the house who lived there, he told everyone: ‘They’re in the attic.’ You can see that even at that time they were still looking for some advantage, something to save themselves, which is why they rather turned someone else in. That’s how it was like… even the Czechs did that in 1938, reporting Germans when they needed some information or something… And then it happened in 1945 when the Germans did it to the Czechs. Because the world was always somehow upside down. It’s a time I don’t want to remember. I don’t want it coming back to me. What we had to go through was terrible. Like this time I saved the Germans. I saved all the German boys from Kašperské Hory. By taking a bus to Sušice, which is where the Czech revolutionary guard corps were at that time, the murderers. They were the worst rabble that ever existed.”

  • “There was school… first of all there were air strikes, it was in 1945. Everything was bombed in Most, everything destroyed. Ervěnice were bombed-out, Most was bombed-out. So, when we went to school, it was just that we came in, took our homework, handed it in and went back. And our English teacher was this British woman who was a Nazi, a terrible Nazi. I was amazed how someone could be as Nazi as she was. And she taught us English. And this one time I peeped out the window when strafing planes were flying by and she shouted at me so harshly, yelling that they could see I was Czech. It was always like… like I was the other nationality than what was convenient at the time. Always the other thing, like first I wasn’t Czech, I was German. Then there were Germans and I was Czech. It always turned around, turning to the wrong direction.”

  • “And it was horror… just horror. We were so scared of them. For fourteen days my sister and I slept behind the chimney. We had enough experience of that. And then we ran away. Well, ran away, they took everything we had from us. That girl that had apprenticed and had sewed at my mother’s. This Věra who had been raised together with us and took advantage of my mother’s benevolence, she’s the one who took it all away from us: ‘Mrs. Niederle, this is mine now and it’s not yours anymore.’ Well and we left only with what we were wearing, we had nothing, nothing. They took everything away, everything. She took everything she could. So, we had nothing. That’s why we went to Most, we had some very distant relatives there, so we spent one night and then we went home, to Kašperské Hory. And because we were Germans, we had to wear this white arm band but we didn’t have it back then in that train. Because otherwise we couldn’t go anywhere. So we didn’t have the arm band and we arrived in Sušice and from there we walked all the way to Bohdašice.”

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    Sušice, 24.02.2020

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    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
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    Sušice, 16.07.2020

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    duration: 41:47
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - PLZ REG ED
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They beat up every German after the war, it’s a time I don’t want to remember

Leante Janderová
Leante Janderová
photo: archív pamětnice

Leante Janderová, née Niederlová, was born July 28, 1930 in Kašperské Hory. Two years after that the family moved to Ervěnice in the Most region. Her father František Niederle got a position there as manager of a Baťa shop during the Great Depression and his wife Josefa Niederlová opened a garment factory there. She was ethnically Czech, he was German and both languages were spoken in their house. After the annexation of Sudetenland, they stayed in Ervěnice. Leante, who had started a Czech school, had to transfer to a German school and later started studying at a German gymnasium. The city Most, where she commuted to, was repeatedly bombed at the end of the war and the bombs hit Ervěnice as well, with tens of houses lying in ruins. Hard times hit the Niederle family in the tense atmosphere of May days in 1945. All their possessions were confiscated, the two daughters had to hide away from the Soviet soldiers for almost two weeks and František Niederle was beaten up senseless by members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. That’s when they decided to fly home to Kašperské Hory which had come under the significantly calmer and safer American zone. Thanks to Josefa Niederlová’s Czech nationality they weren’t expelled from the country. There was a U.S. garrison stationed in Kašperské Hory and one of the soldiers chose Rita Niederle, Leante’s older sister, as his future wife. Soon after they flew to the U.S. and spent a happy life together. Leante’s life in Czechoslovakia, on the other hand, was considerably more complicated. She wasn’t allowed to finish her studies after February 1948 and for a long time she couldn’t find a job that would be adequate to her above-average language skills. She had several blue-collar jobs and only in 1965 managed to get a job as a receptionist in the Škoda hotel in Pilsen. She married Boris Jandera, an officer of the Czechoslovak People’s Army, in 1950, despite the army explicitly prohibiting marriage with her. He didn’t obey and had to leave the army. During the time when Leante Janderová started working in the hotel in Pilsen, State Security agents began regularly contacting her. These were said to be routine visits to all receptionists who were interacting with the accommodated foreigners on a daily basis. However, the preserved materials from the Security Services Archive indicate that she was listed as a collaborator of the State Security. Several times throughout her lifetime, she and her close ones found themselves taken in tow by historical events that she practically couldn’t influence and was forced to adapt to them. Peace and real freedom to make choices about her own life only came after the fall of communism in November 1989.