“It all came out, opened up, everything out of the suitcase, they went through your purse – you never knew if they left everything in there that had been there. They levied a duty on a dress that I had bought two years before, in Žulová at that. But I guess it had been imported. That was the worst, at the border.”
“The kulaks moved in here. None of the locals were locked up as kulaks, but they moved in to the farm there from Pardubice and from South Bohemia. But other than that, there wasn’t anyone here locked up at the time. I think they didn’t have such a connection with the farm as the people who built it up themselves. They were assignees, so they got it assigned to them, the property, in ’45 or ’46.”
“The people who were deported, well, Mr Šafařík would walk around with a drum and read out a list of who all had to be at the meeting point next day. And then they went to the detention camp in Mikulovice.”
Alžběta Reinoldová was born in the border town of Nysa in Prussia’s Upper Silesia (given to Poland after World War II) on 21 November 1938. She comes from a Sudeten German family and still considers herself to be of German nationality. Her life is connected to the village of Kobylá nad Vidnavkou in the Jeseník District – less than 30 kilometres from her native Nysa – which was the birthplace of her parents, Jindřich and Marta Reinold. In September 1939, her father was drafted into the Wehrmacht; he came home in spring 1945. His brothers also had to fight for the Third Reich. Despite their German nationality, the family was not deported after the war, unlike most of the inhabitants of the village. In 1965 she visited her deported relatives in Bavaria in West Germany. However, she never left the Jeseník District for good. Before going into retirement in the early 1990s, she worked at Gala Hukovice, a factory near Kobylá that produced shopping bags. As of 2020, she lived in Kobylá nad Vidnavkou.
