Horst Moudrý

“We lived in our own house, and we already knew that our neighbours had been marched to the station at gunpoint. Seeing as four of us were working – my father, my sister, myself and so on – they needed to let us know at work that we would be banished, so that we’d come home. When we’d all gathered at home, mum and younger siblings were sitting on the edge of a gutter in front of our house, waiting for us. The actual round-up to the station had already finished and dad said, surely, we won’t run to catch up with them ourselves. The house had already been sealed, but mum had spread some linen in the garden for the sun to bleach, and so that was lucky, we gathered that, and a small hay cart which was luckily stood behind the house, and that was everything we had.”

“Here in Frýdlant, the war was about to break out and it was closer and closer. Our father was in Görlitz, and our mum had six kids on her hands, and what if there’s a war?! She picked us up – my brother Honza was only four months old, he’d been born on May 1, 1938, so he was still in a pram – and we crossed the border to Germany at Zawidow, that wasn’t a problem. But now this horde of people turned up at my father’s place, he had a single room, one bed, one table and three chairs, and now what to do about us?! The people around were willing to help, though, so they took me and another sibling in. And then out of the blue there was an announcement that emigrants from Silesia and the Sudetenland were not allowed in the German border regions. So, they dispatched a special train bound for the Baltic Sea. We arrived at Berlin, and Berlin is like Prague in that there’s a number of train stations, Berlin Bahnhof, Berlin Anhalt and Berlin Hauptbahnhof, to name a few, and you have to travel between them. This means they had a coach waiting for us on arrival of the train and this coach would have taken us to another train station. We children boarded the coach when suddenly someone said, ‘All of the Moudrýs out of the coach! There’s no space for the pram’. So, we got off, the last coach had gone, and it was almost night, and we were six children with their mother with nowhere to go. Then the Red Cross took care of us, and they allowed us to spend the night in the waiting room. And in the morning, they picked us up and dropped us off at Königs Wusterhausen, which was famous for its radio transmitter tower, about twenty kilometres outside of Berlin. They dropped us off in some village with a lake resort where there were empty construction workers’ lodgings. There were other people like us from Silesia there. We got our meals from the canteen on the village outskirts, which meant first we had to walk over there in the morning. And they wouldn’t dish out your breakfast straight away, but first we had to march and pay respects to the flag before it was raised and only then would we get something to eat. We actually had to sing a song we’d never heard before and didn’t know the lyrics to. That was our first encounter with National Socialism – all of us together!”