“The next day my mother went to register to the place where all the people who returned had to report themselves. It applied to everybody. One was either Czech or German. All of us who had stayed in Opava throughout the war had German documents. My family had them as well, because Czechs lived in the surrounding villages, but at the same time they were actually citizens of Germany – Sudeten Germans with Czech nationality. But we did not have the Czech nationality written in our documents, because we kept our German nationality after our dad. We thus could not avoid the assembly camp, and that was the beginning of the postwar events.”
“Suicides, horrors, hunger. I cannot say that they were beating people. I didn’t see them beat anyone. But the rules were indeed strict – you have to do it, even though you cannot go on anymore. Those old grannies and families. As long as I am alive, I suffer when I remember one scene that I cannot erase from my memory. There was an old granny. She could be as old as I am now. She was a teeny-weeny woman. Her name was Meierová and she was from the family of the baker who lived in Černá Street just like us. We knew them. The poor thing arrived there with her family. Her daughter and the others had to go to work, but she remained lying there on the planks that served for a bed. I don’t know if she was covered with some blanket, but the hard wooden bed under her must have been terribly painful for her. She remained lying there until the evening when they came back from working on cleaning the debris.”
“At the beginning I met a friend of mine whom I knew from the time when I was going to the Czech school. His name was Zdeněk Vitisk and he returned to Opava after the war as well. He asked me what I was doing there and I said: ‘You know how it was.’ He was from Kateřinky, too, from Rolnická Street. He accompanied me home and I found this membership card there (card of the World Literary Club). Can you imagine how important this document was? When I showed it to the inexperienced commander of the camp, he thought that it was a card from some underground organization which opposed Hitler. I was thus released. We also received Czech food ration stamps. Later we received permission to have our mom released, and to be able to inform the sister of my mom, who married a pure-blooded Czech. He came from Třebíč and he had served as an official in Opava before the war. We sent him a note and asked him to come to Opava to help us if possible. When he arrived he showed them the Protectorate ID card and began arguing with them: ‘What were you thinking? They are my family. What have you done to them, and why? Don’t you know that they are Czechs?’ I don’t know what he told them, but he simply managed to set my mom free.”
“As my mom and I were approaching Opava, we ran across dead bodies. As we were walking with our little wagon through those villages, a Russian military car hit us. We had to leave the wagon in a ditch and we grabbed only what we could carry on our backs. That was still not all. Some fighting must have taken place near the village Mikolajce, because on our way there we were encountering dead bodies and dead cows. There were terrible scenes. Dead soldiers were still lying there. I don’t know if they were Russians or Germans. There was a leg there, a body over there, and so on. Only later, when some order was established, the first thing they did was that they removed the bodies due to sanitary reasons. That was what I really saw with my own eyes when we were returning to Opava.”
Alžběta Kubišová, née Larischová, was born May 21, 1928 in Kateřinky (Kathrein in German), which now forms the municipal district of Opava. Her father was a German national and her mother was Czech. Alžběta experienced the takeover of the town by wehrmacht army in October 1938, the war years, and then the declaration of Opava as a fortified city and subsequent evacuation of civilians in March 1945. After her return to Opava, both she and her mother were interned in the assembly camp for German inhabitants and sent to work on cleaning the debris of the city that was damaged by bombing. She was released only after showing a membership card from the World Literary Club, which the warden apparently considered to be an identification card of a secret resistance organization. In 1946 she married Vladislav Kubiš and in 1952 they moved to Vítkov, where Alžběta lives today. For many years she has been a member of the Ackermann-Gemeinde and she still assists with organizing and guiding the visits of former German natives of Opava.
