Günter Klemenz

* 1941

  • “My grandfather then became ill, due to the hard work at the end of in Ostrava. I assume it was pneumonia. And then, when he was almost dying, they took him to the Krnov hospital again, Grandma visited him there, once or several times. And then sadly on 29 December he died in the Krnov hospital and was buried at the Krnov cemetery. My uncle, his son, found the grave in the sixties and photographed and fixed it up. But that grave no longer exists, over the last two or three years I’ve tried to find the grave in the cemetery based on that one photograph of where it was placed. The whole space is full of other graves. I think that the memorial in the back right-hand corner, for the victims of 1945 who died while still here, I think that memorial includes his memory as well. I now see it as his grave, when I go to the Krnov cemetery.”

  • “We went on foot. I remember the gravel road. Mum was pushing the pram, the thing’s wheel kept falling off. I picked up the wheel and she put it back on, but it didn’t hold on the axle, it was missing the clip that held it in place. So she had to lift the pram on one side to stop the wheel from falling off. I can still remember that. And also the second night, where we slept over in Frývaldov. Under the open sky, in a factory courtyard. Because the next day we crossed the mountains, we walked for hours and hours uphill. At Videlské sedlo, when the march passed that place, I think we rested there. The people were completely exhausted. And then we carried on. And on the third day we got to Ostružná and were allowed to leave the march. I know I was ill already, my mother told me we probably wouldn’t have made it, if we’d stayed in that march.”

  • “My mother kept telling me this story. It was of course terrible to have to leave the house you live in all of a sudden. The men weren’t home and the women were brutally informed they had to leave in a short time. My mother had the chance, when we were already in the camp, she managed to get back for a short while. She asked if she could be allowed to bring her sewing machine She went home and there was a strange couple living there and she asked the lady if she could take her sewing machine. The woman agreed, brought the machine, my mother had this little cart with her and they loaded the sewing machine onto it. At that moment the husband came home. He saw it and got angry, saying that wasn’t possible. My mother pleaded with him once more, but he threatened her with a pistol, saying she had to leave the sewing machine there. And so she had to go back. Without the sewing machine.”

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    Krnov, 27.06.2022

    (audio)
    duration: 01:28:23
    media recorded in project The Removed Memory
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My grandfather has no grave. I visit the memorial to the victims of Krnov internation camps instead.

Mother, Günter and brother in a pram 1944/1945
Mother, Günter and brother in a pram 1944/1945
photo: pamětník

Günter Klemenz was born in 1941 to a German family in Krnov. His mother was a tailor, his father a tanner. But during his childhood, Klemenz only saw his father sporadically, from 1939 he was called to service in the Wehrmacht and fell into Russian captivity. Günther therefore grew up with his mother and grandparents in their house, which today is Fügnerova Street No. 9. In the initial post- war days, Günther, his mother and younger brother had to leave the house, being placed in one of the Krnov internment camps for Germans, most likely the one in Cvilín. From here, in June 1945, they joined the so-called hunger march, in which roughly three thousand Germans were expelled on foot from Krnov. Estimates are that about three hundred of them didn’t survive the journey. The foot march lasted several days and led from Krnov to Králíky, but, after two days and nights, the Klemenz family were allowed to leave and stay with their relatives in Ostružná, which possibly saved the exhausted children’s lives. They lived with their mother’s relatives in Ostružná (Špornava at the time) until the autumn, when they hid in the flat of a Czech relative in Valašské Meziříčí. From January 1946 until expulsion in July of that year, they lived in an abandoned farmhouse in Petříkov u Ostružné. They were expelled in cattle cars to Bavaria, where they initially lived with some farmers and after meeting up with their father, in the industrial towns of Rhineland. Günter Klemenz is a doctor, gynaecologist. Between 1976–1980 he also worked at a missionary hospital in Rwanda. Since 2017, he has participated in events memorialising the hunger march in Krnov, on 28 June 2022 he took part in the first symbolic reconciliation march of both Czechs and Germans.