"I got a high fever and then my mother too. It was typhus and that used to mean you were written off to die. So they dropped us off and put us in some infirmary. Then we were in the hospital, but luckily we both got out of it and recovered. But the transport was already gone and they didn't let us go back home. We didn't have any documents, so they took us to a village and assigned my mother to one of the landowners, and she had to serve them there. She wanted to write a letter home but was not allowed to. When she got a little familiar there, we started going to church, which was a little further away in the village. Mom sang very well. The parish priest noticed this and asked her if she could sing in the choir loft, that he did not have a female singer. Mom agreed. He asked her about her story and promised to help her. He told her to write a letter, that he would send it to her family in the Czech Republic."
"Mom still wanted to go home. The priest helped her write letters to Berlin to the authorities that we are not Germans, that we are Czechs and we want to go home, but we were always rejected. But one day my mother received a letter that her father had died here. She set her mind that she wanted to go home at all costs, even without documents. The pastor told her that he had an acquaintance who was transferring across the border and asked if she would dare to go with me across the border. She said yes, she would risk it. So we ran away secretly at night. No one was allowed to know, not even the farmer, only the parish priest, who took us somewhere close to the border at night and gave my mother instructions on what to do and how to do it."
"It so happened that in the end we didn't meet the smuggler, we missed him and night came. I really remember that. I see the headlights of a car coming towards us. It was already dark and mom jumped into the ditch and we never got out of that ditch. Mom took me a little further, there were deep forests. They said I fell asleep right away, but she didn't sleep all night. She moved on with me in the morning. We had such a roll of the most necessary things. But I was not able to carry it anymore. Mom unpacked some of those things and I know that we hid it behind one big tree stump and then we really only carried the most necessary things. And luckily, suddenly soldiers came against us and they were Czechs, so they arrested us."
"I was tiny, I was two years old. We didn't return until after the age of 48. My mother learned from the letter that her father had died here. And she really wanted to go home. However, Berlin did not give us any documents, everything was gone. We had no documents; we were completely without any resources. They were already counting on us to stay there, to turn us into Germans. When the pastor saw that his mother was brave, he asked her, whether she dared to cross the border with me illegally, that he had smugglers across the border. It so it happened that as we went with my mother, it was dark... it was already dark, the Ore Mountains up there, as the Czech Republic crosses to the German border, so there are deep forests. And we went that way with my mother and the headlights from the car against us. So Mom jumped into the ditch with me so she wouldn't catch us, and we stayed in that deep forest that night. They really caught us and it was the Czechs. My mother served them there for more than a week, served them on the border for about fourteen days, and in the meantime it was up to the ministry and the embassy in Germany to see if we were really Czechs. Well, in the end it was explained, in the end everything settled down and my uncle, the only one here in Opava, was the only one in the family with a car. So, he came to those borders to fetch us."
"They placed my mother on the farm as a maid. It was all sorts of things because the farm owner was not a good person. She made her mother know a lot that we were not Germans, that she was a maid. My mother went to church, there was a bit of it, there was a church in that village and my mother sang nicely, so the pastor wanted her to sing there as well. However, she asked for permission back, as was the end of the war, she wanted to go back home, that we were Czech, that we did not belong to Germany, that we wanted to go home. My father was not allowed to write at all so that she could write, so the pastor was so kind that my mother sent letters to the Czech Republic through him, and only after a year did my father find out where we were. It was really that cruel."
"In Opava and the Germans rioted here at the end of the war, because they had already seen that they probably lost the war. And I had a grandmother who married a German. My mother and I were visiting her, and now suddenly the Germans broke in with pistols, and now that we didn't ask much, they drove us to the train station at the eastern station. And it was called the last transport in Opava. Grandma was taken too, and then we were leaving. We didn't know where, no one knew anything. My dad didn't even know what was going on. We left, we couldn't leave a message, nothing. And my father didn't know where we were the whole year. And we went and my mother and I both got sick on that transport. I got a high fever. Then somewhere the train stopped and Grandma wanted to get some water to bring me. However, the train started, Grandma was running, and the other train ran over her legs. She died and my mother and I went on. Finally, the doctor told us that we had typhus. So they put us in the infirmary. And they thought, They will die. But my mother and I really got away with it."
She was born Pavlíková on September 27, 1943 in Opava. In August 1945, she was forcibly displaced to Germany with her mother and grandmother as part of a brutal deportation. Her grandmother died during transport after being run over by a train. Both Annelies and her mother suffered from typhus on the way. After recovery, they lived in the village Abtsbessingen in Thuringia in the then Soviet zone of Germany, where their mother worked on a farm. Her mother unsuccessfully applied for permission to return to Czechoslovakia. In 1948, they returned to their homeland illegally across the green border. Her mother was tried for illegal border crossing. The authorities eventually allowed them to stay. Five-year-old Annelies only spoke German when she returned to Opava. She trained as a hairdresser in Opava. She worked in a hairdressing salon, in a waterworks, as an assistant printer. She married Jaroslav Klapetka, with whom she had three children. In 2022, she lived in the family house in Slavkov near Opava.
Štěpánka Pavlíková - the mother of Annelies Klapetková, with her mother-in-law Adolfina Peschková, the apartment in Solná Street in Opava, World War II
Štěpánka Pavlíková - the mother of Annelies Klapetková, with her mother-in-law Adolfina Peschková, the apartment in Solná Street in Opava, World War II
