„My mother had acquaintances among the Czechs who were stationed here, and they used to visit us. But there all were Nazis around us and then it started. They started chasing us. Once Mr. Wiesner came and said: 'Mrs. Resslova, the Gestapo is coming to you, stop associating with those people.' Not long after that, I was leaving school, I had to walk for over an hour to Mníšek, and down in Schönbach I see a motorcycle with a sidecar, a person with those visors, and he says, ‘Are you Resslová?’ I said yes. He threw me into that sidecar. I came upstairs and everything was messed up. Everything was thrown out everywhere and there was an SS man standing there saying: 'Well, we'll keep an eye on you. Next time we come, you go to the camp. We'll give you a star and send you to the camp.' But there was an older one who saw that my mother was completely done with it. He said: 'Come on, Rudi, you won't find anything here.' Because in the desk they found the pistol that my father had, a Browning. But we never used it. My mother told them that father left it to protect us, that we were alone by the woods.“
„In November 1945, we were thrown out of the barracks and ended up in the camp in Stráž nad Nisou, number 10, I still remember that today. I was already older, so my mother cut my hair, fed me, we were covered in lice because there was dirt and everything. For the day we got a small tin, a piece of military bread, and every time the commander was drunk, a police officer came, because there were more of us, there were three families, three women and a total of seven children. Every evening, this guy came like this, looked, pointed and said - you come with me. My mother was abused several times, scratched, everything. Those were the galleys in that camp, because the Russians ruled there.“
„It was an atrocity, they took everything they could from me. Once I was alone at home, my mother went to buy something, and suddenly a Russian guy, like a Mongol, was sitting on the window, smelling terribly. He jumped in, we had a cooker on the stove where eggs were being boiled. He saw the bottle of alcohol next to it. He took it, pardon my language, he just chugged it, drank the eggs, and only then he noticed me. Margitka was sitting downstairs at the table, I just wanted to feed her. I grabbed her, threw her out the window and called for help. The Russian grabbed my braid and chased me around the table, and I don't even know how, but I've had a sixth sense since I was young. I grabbed a stool, punched him and jumped out the window. Right across from us they took us under protection, we were hidden by the Wiesners at the top of the hayloft.“
Hedvika Rudolfová, née Dittrichová, was born on May 27, 1933 in Tanvald to a German family. After their father’s death, they moved with their mother to Mníšek near Liberec, where they received news about the planned occupation of the border area by German soldiers. They fled to Rovensko pod Troskami and did not return to the newly formed Imperial County of Sudetenland until the end of 1938, when the mother decided to remarry. During the war, the witness’s mother worked in a factory in Mníšek near Liberec, where she met several fully deplyed Czechs who secretly went to their place to listen to foreign radio. Because of this, they were investigated three times by the Gestapo. After the end of the war, the witness had to move out of the house with her mother and sister and ended up in a concentration camp for Sudeten Germans in Stráž nad Nisou, where terrible conditions prevailed. From September 1946, Hedvika Rudolfová began attending a Czech school, where new persecutions by a Russian teacher would await her. After completing compulsory schooling, she was not allowed to study as a German, so she started working as a dry cleaner and later in a restaurant in Příšovice near Turnov. She briefly worked as a waitress in Bratislava or at the Bedřichov Military Rehabilitation Center in Špindlerův Mlýn, where prominent officers went for recreation. In August 1961, she went to visit her brother in Berlin, where they remained trapped in the eastern part of the Berlin Wall after the construction began. In 1963, the Rudolfs moved to Liberec, and not long after, the witness divorced her husband, started working again in the hospitality industry and raised two children by herself. She gradually worked in several businesses in Liberec, such as the Imperial hotel, the Pošta cafe or the Zlatý lev hotel. Liberec also experienced a fatal incursion by Warsaw Pact troops, who attacked civilians in the square in front of the town hall. Hedvika Rudolfová worked in the hospitality industry until 1988, when she retired. She lived in Liberec at the time of filming (2022).
