Ewald Pechwitz

“In that letter or notice it said that we had to be somewhere at five in the morning. And it said that any defiance would be punished by concentration camp, which was practically a death sentence. So nobody dared try that. But plenty of old people were so scared that a number of them committed suicide. I know there was an older farmer in my distant family, who hung himself. Those people just didn’t want to leave.”

“Not long before expulsion, immediately after the end of the war, the whole population had to gather together at least once in the Kravaře marketplace and we had to watch them brutally torturing former Nazi Party members and dignitaries. Everyone had to watch, even children. I was there with my mother and of course I was curious to see what was going on, what with all those people there and everyone watching something and I wanted her to lift me up to see as well. Terrible things happened there. For example they hung up one local farmer by the legs and let him hang there and apparently people’s own relatives had to hit the people who were guilty and if they didn’t hit them, they were beaten themselves. And sometimes they almost beat people to death for petty reasons. They found Wehrmacht blankets on one farmer’s land and thought he was hiding Germans. Above all, if they found weapons on someone’s land, that was an almost certain death sentence.”

“I went with my friends from school and one day we met a man going the other way, a stranger who was leading my sister by the hand. She was two years younger than me. Of course I had no idea who he was, we said ‘Good day!’ and wanted to keep going. And then it became clear this was my father, who we’d been waiting for, for so long. According to the documents I found, it was in March 1946 when he found us.”

“You hardly had enough time to pack your things. All you were allowed to take was what you could carry. You had to leave jewellery and any valuables, people weren’t allowed to take musical instruments. And then, at the border they checked everyone’s luggage again, and if anyone had any jewels on them, they were confiscated. They took wedding rings from wives. Everything the controllers thought could be useful, they confiscated.”