Leo Schön

"We didn't have a calendar or a watch, they took it from us. We were in a cattle carriage, with luggage in the front and back and people sitting in the middle. Often they sat on the floor. I was allowed to climb up on top of the luggage where there was a small barred window. I would sit in front of it and call down, `Now we're going past the potato field, now we're going past the field, now comes the forest.' I don't know how long that went on. Then we arrived in Demmin in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Everything was unloaded and we came to the equestrian barracks where they had a big stable. There were four hundred people in the stable. Downstairs a row of beds, upstairs a row of beds for a hundred people each, twice, on both sides, so four hundred people. We were given two pieces of bread and watery soup."

"When I was in the garden, at about 1:30 a.m., a truck arrived with six or seven partisans sitting on it. They wanted to enter the gate, which was locked. They started firing machine guns in the air. I climbed over the fence in the back. As a child I was good at climbing fences because my mother used to lock me in the garden and I always escaped. I ran straight to the brickyard. Mum was already there with the caretaker who told her we had to get out of the house. We ran with Mum for three and a half kilometers to Olivětín. The partisans were standing in front of the gate. Mum unlocked the door, they pushed us in and said, 'Thirty minutes, twenty-five kilos.' But we didn't know anything, we weren't prepared, we didn't know we were going to be driven out of the house. My mother ran up to the attic where my baby carriage was. The two of us carried it down and put it in front of the wardrobe. Mummy was loading the pram with bedding and some of the more expensive things we had. One of the guerrillas always came and picked up the pram. When he shook his head, it wasn't 25 kilos yet. Of course, he didn't weigh it, he took it intuitively. When he picked up the pram and nodded his head, we had to stop loading. Mummy dressed me in two or three shirts, two sweaters, a winter coat. It was August and hot. She put on my boots and two pants, because that didn't count for the 25 kilos. And so within half an hour they drove us out of the house and we were standing in the street."