Ilsa Sanetrníková

* 1937

  • "I know that [mother] kept going to the national committee, and she would say: 'I'm going to beg again not to expel us.' And she brought various gifts there. I don't know where she got them, just some stuff from home, so they would let her stay here. Nothing special happened." - "And how many people were deported?" - "But the deportation was so terrible because most of the expelled people walked past us on this asphalt road to Žitava. This was terrible. But most people left Machnín by train. It wasn't so bad there, but they were riding with thirty kilos, so it was no glory."

  • "We were afraid that they would torture us like this again. That was one thing. There's one big hill, and that's where they always tied us up in the winter. One or the other, or both, and they ran us over in sledges. That was very unpleasant." - "Did you understand, as a child, why they did this?" - "I told my mom, but she couldn't do anything about it. She said: 'You have to survive somehow.' And it got better over time. It took about half a year. Then I started talking Czech, and they just didn't do it anymore."

  • "They would drown me and drive me over with a sledge. That means they were waiting for me. There were many of them, and we were two German women and from divorced marriages. We tried walking different routes. We would only go home in the evening because we were afraid of being caught. They caught us, and when they caught us, they tied us up. And there is a little stream under Bedřichovka, and they would just drown us there. I'm surprised they didn't drown us to death because they were heartless.'

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    Liberec, 12.04.2021

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After the war, they would try to catch them and drown them. The girls did not leave school until after dark to escape the torture.

The witness with her mother, circa 1941-42
The witness with her mother, circa 1941-42
photo: Witness archive

Ilsa Sanetrníková was born on September 8, 1937, in Liberec as Wiedenová. Her mother, Kamila, was born on June 6, 1910, with the birth name Procházková. In the 1930s, she lived in Liberec with her later husband, Rudolf Wieden. He was German. He was born in 1912, still during the German Empire. He came to Czechoslovakia to work and trained as a glazier. Ilsa was an only child. She lived with her parents in Friedrichshain, a small village near Liberec, renamed Bedřichovka after 1945. They only spoke German at home - Ilsa learned Czech after the war. When the global conflict broke out, Rudolf had to enlist in the Wehrmacht. He served in Norway. The post-war exile did not affect the witness, but she and her friend felt mistreatment when their classmates tried catching t them and drowning them. At the age of eight, Ilsa and her mother moved to nearby Hamrštejn. Her father did not return until long after the war under unclear circumstances. Among other things, as a glazier, he worked on the construction of the current transmitter on Ještěd. Ilsa met Reiner Santrník, and they had a son named Tomáš in 1963. At that time, she moved to Liberec. She still lived there in 2021.