When I am driving through my native countryside today, I feel like driving through a nature reserve. Where have the people gone?
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Heinz Sattler comes from Plesná near Františkovy Lázně, where he was born into a German family in 1933. He recalls Nazi propaganda of his school years during the war, when the Sudetenland was then part of the German Reich. His father, Johann Sattler, joined the Wehrmacht at that time. Towards the end of the war, Plesná was shelled from two sides by both the retreating German and the approaching American armies. After the liberation and the departure of the American army from Plesná, the German population faced the acts of post-war revenge when so-called “partisans” ruled the village. Germans were wearing armbands, had their food coupons cut, and children did not attend school. The house of the Sattler family was occupied by a Czech family, with whom they lived under the same roof for some time. They were deported to the American zone of occupied Germany in May or June 1946 in cattle wagons, before which they had stayed in the Cheb internment camp. At the time of the interview (2022), Heinz Sattler lived in Eichenzell, Hessen, a densely populated area. Passing through the countryside of his childhood, he is fascinated by how depopulated it is.
