He was fined for dating a German woman
Download image
Herta Mondeková, née Bernertová, was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Adolfovice (Adelfsdorf in German) as the youngest child of three. Her parents were of German nationality. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was four years old and in 1940 her mother took the children to a manual worker’s colony in Frývaldov (today’s Jeseník, Freiwaldau in German). Europe was already at war and so in 1944 Herta’s oldest brother Rudolf was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He was only about 160 centimetres tall and judging by his portrait photograph he looked more like a fifteen-year-old than an eighteen-year-old. Only a couple of months later, in November 1944 her mother received a letter saying that after a battle at the town of Gołdap, in north-eastern Poland, her son was filed as missing, which effectively meant that he was dead. It was during this time that Herta’s second brother Erich was drafted too, at the young age of seventeen. He was later captured and spent some time in a prison camp in the American occupation zone in Austria. Following his release he could no longer return to Czechoslovakia and ended up settling in the town of Lörrach in the Federal Republic of Germany. He only managed to meet his mother twelve years after the war when she finally received a permission from the authorities to visit her son. After the war the family was not designated for expulsion but in 1948, during the relocation of the remaining Germans, they were sent to do agricultural work in the Kroměříž area. The family applied several times for a permission to leave for Germany, to no avail. They were allowed to return to Jeseník in 1953 after being awarded their Czechoslovakian citizenship again. From that point, Herta worked in the local textile factory until retirement. In 1957 she married Ladislav Mondek. He was one of the Romanian Slovaks who re-emigrated back to Czechoslovakia in 1947. As of 2017, Herta Mondeková still lived in Jeseník.
