Anna Marková

"My grandmother told me about it. I used to walk with her around the houses and she would say, 'He came here, took what he could and moved out. He came with nothing, but he left with a wagon.' They just took what was left in the houses they came to. They moved in, took what they could, ordered a wagon and moved back to where they came from. And there were more of them. Only the ones that wanted to stay here because we came to a beautiful country, we stayed here. But the ones who just wanted to make a buck, they made a buck and left. And my grandmother always said that's still the case. She's always digging. She always comes in with nothing, but she leaves with the wagons."

"There were more people like that here. They needed craftsmen for the factory so that the factory could start up again. They needed glassmakers to train new ones. There was still a cork factory here before the combine was established. I don't remember what was made there, but I know it was called a cork factory. There was a Koh-i-noor factory where they worked. There were Germans there too. In every factory they needed certain people who they knew were really skilled and they didn't hurt anybody during the war. That was the main thing. They couldn't be die-hard Germans. They would have been sent away, but there were plenty of them left. I remember the characters, the likenesses, but I don't remember the names. It was really a bunch of names." - "And could you tell they were Germans? Maybe by their clothes?" - "No. They dressed normally. They wore their clothes all the time, but not that they were somehow showing that they were German. They walked like normal, ordinary people... And my grandmother always told me that I had to be polite to them, because they were polite people... Just as I taught my grandchildren to greet older people, my grandmother also told us this. She used to stop and talk to them, and she used to drill it into our heads that we shouldn't patronize them because they were normal people like us."