Ervín Šolc

* 1927

  • "When you consider listening to a foreign radio, when you pass on the news, you could have lost your life. And during the war we lived in a house, where there were two apartments in the hallway. And that stupid London announced its broadcast by drumming. That's the V sign for victory. And that sound could be heard in the hallway as in the kitchen. And he always sat near the radio with his ears really close, just to hear it so he wouldn't have to, and I have to say, the people knew we were listening to someone else's radio, and not just London. He was so obsessed that he listened to Moscow, and there was still an illegal radio. It was called I think der Soldatensender, it was an illegal breadcasting, he still had to listen to it. So every day we were exposed to someone reporting us. But the people were so respectable that during the whole war we listened and survived unscathed."

  • „During the debates that took place in the meantime, he stayed with us, too, and Dad always told him, 'Doctor, you have to leave, the Reich will be the end of the Jews. This will happen, either there will be a war or Hitler will enter in here and there will mean a catastrophe.' And he replied: ´Oh no, Mr. Šolc, we got a promise from Henlein, that the same measures that were applied to the Germans in Reich will not take place here ever. And for that, we also gave some money as a Jewish community.“

  • "The problem of mixed marriages actually occurred mainly after the war, because during the first republic there were thousands of those mixed marriages, especially in the Sudetenland. And my father was not such a conscious Czech again, because he was a communist and his homeland was the Soviet Union and Stalin was his god. In addition, he came from a family of six children, and when they then got married, in the end three were Czechs and three Germans. So the problem of mixed marriage in the family as such has never played a role at all, but political views have played a role."

  • “At twelve o´clock the stream was running down on the floor towards the door and someone had to clean up. That was always us, the Germans. In Lauferovka, that was the prison, we were placed together with the criminals. They were all criminal cases for investigation.“

  • “I still (was – editor ´s note) with another friend from here. Sadly he also died. As we were standing and on the opposite side there was an execution commando. Just to give an order and it was done. And a certain American lieutenant, I guess he was a sergeant, a real big lad, he stopped walking past us. We were also slowing the traffic as we were standing transversely. He said: ‚What is happening here?‘ One of our boys could speak English well, so he explained what was going on. He had his machine-gun in the back, so he turned it around and took it in his hands and pointed at Italians, saying: ‚Go on, go on.‘ That was already past war, when we threw our guns away, and we were lucky not to get shot dead there.“

  • “114th so called hunter´s division was also placed in Yugoslavia and Tito, when we got captured, he wanted the division, so that Americans placed them for construction labours. But thanks got Americans did not oblige. We would not get out (straight away? – incomprehensible, editor´s note) from there. There (in Italy – editor´s note) I was in two years. We were building an airport for the purposes of the third world war.“

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Liberec, 11.03.2017

    (audio)
    duration: 01:45:50
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Liberec, 21.07.2020

    (audio)
    duration: 01:14:50
    media recorded in project Příběhy regionu - HRK REG ED
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For a long time I did not know, if I was German or Czech, and only for my personal experience in prison I realised I was German

Ervin Šolc in Italy
Ervin Šolc in Italy
photo: archiv Ervina Šolce

Ervín Šolc was born on 24 July, 1927 in Liberec in the former Czechoslovakia. He comes from a mixed German-Czech marriage; his father was Czech and his mother German. Also his dad was a convinced communist and as he took an anti-Nazi attitude, he was arrested by the Nazi authorities in 1938. Young Ervín Šolc during the protectorate times joined Hitlerjugend and on 3rd January, 1945 joined the Wehrmacht. He served at the 114th hunter´s division and after the training he was sent to Italy to fight against the former partisans and a light machine-gun shooter. Yet in the lowlands of the river Pád he was arrested by American army units and spent several months in the prisoner´s camp in Bologna, Livorno and Naples, where he could even convert to the Western Czechoslovak army thanks to the Czechoslovak mission. That did not happen and he was then transferred to Bavarian Dachau, and released on 25th June, 1947. On the same year he crossed the borders illegally near Žitava and was arrested by the Czechoslovak authorities. After release he settled down in his native town, got married and worked as a legal clerk and then as an accountant and later in the woodworking industry and finally joined the Regional administration of manufacture cooperatives in Liberec, where he became its chairman. In 1968 had to leave his job, and made his living as an economist and due to his stay in American prisoner´s camps he was persecuted by the state police. Following 1989 he chaired the German association in Liberec for a long time and also worked in the Council for national minorities. Currently Ervín Šolc lives in Liberec and his relatives live in Germany as well as the Czech Republic.