Eduard Steun

* 1946

  • "My brother - when he was temporarily working in the Kvilda forest district - was entrusted with the Černá hora forest section. For some time, there was no coach driver for wood delivery. So my brother took care of it and one day, two German women from Kvilda got lost. No-one knew what happened to them, they simply disappeared. Later there came a postcard from Germany with a big diagonal CENSORED stamp on it. In that message the German women thanked my brother for helping them to cross the border. My father went almost crazy; I thought that he was going to kill him. Because if the border guards or the police had found out about it, they would have imprisoned my parents and put us in a home for children and that would be terrible. He loaded them on his cart, threw hay on them and headed for the border, like if he was carrying horse fodder. Later he told us that he had even encountered the border guards. But since they knew him, they exchanged a few words and let him go. They had no idea that he had two grannies underneath the hay."

  • "Me and my sister had to sit on a sofa in the kitchen while the State Security members were searching the whole house. My mother had to assist them, because my father was not at home. And we had to sit on that couch while a soldier with a machine gun was watching us. He was standing right in front of us and I got a good view, so I can remember to this day what he wore, how he looked like, everything. I know that he had these leather straps on his trousers and black working boots. It was before they started wearing those big black army boots. I know that precisely because I was looking at his feet while he was walking there holding his machine gun in his hands. Not that he was pointing it at us, but he had to watch us. The backyard was full of soldiers, policemen and those agents. They were definitely from the State Security. They had these leather coats and wore hats on their heads, they looked exactly the same, like if they had a uniform. They had visited us several times before and they always wanted to know something. They wanted to know if there was someone asking for a way to the border and things like that. That was happening all the time. And when they burned down the house of the Pösl family, they wanted to know, who slept where and so on. There was a barn right next to our lodge and it was always open for a pair of tamed does, who came there for hay. So it could have easily happened that someone had stayed there overnight. Therefore my parents were terrified of any traces to be found there. Fortunately nothing like that was found there. But the State Security agents visited us several more times after that."

  • "After my father arrived to Literbach, he wanted to familiarize himself with the terrain so he would have an idea of what forests he had to manage. So they were walking through the woods together with the trainee Kroupa. And one day, in a place on the edge of the forest called Zaječí tanec or Rabbit dance, they found shoe tips sticking out of the ground in several places. So they dug a little into the earth and found corpses. My father reported the find immediately to the SNB (National Security Corps – the regular police) and soon experts from Pilsen arrived. They found out that it was corpses of twelve women from the death march from the Svatava concentration camp, which was next to Skolov. It was called Falknov back then. It was twelve women. And they had to be exhumed. So they brought the Germans from Literbach and they had to exhume them with no equipment, even without gloves. They said that it was a horrible stench. It was sort of a punishment for them."

  • “Back then there was a lot of illegal poaching going on in those woods and it was mainly the soldiers from the Zhůří garrison who were responsible for it. This annoyed my dad quite a bit and therefore he would repeatedly ask them to stop it. But their commander insisted that they had nothing to do with it and he altogether ignored my dad. They would come time and again to Zlatá Studna to hunt for deer and other wild animals. They came with their army jeeps and you could hear shots being fired in the woods. This continued until once my dad ran into them while they were loading some deer that they had just shot onto an army truck. It was the very same commander who had previously claimed that they were innocent and one of the cooks – they got caught in the act. After this they became afraid that my dad could start to talk. That was at the very moment when we were about to move from Zlatá Studna to Horská Kvilda. In the attic of the house in Horská Kvilda where we were supposed to move in lived the trainee Kroupa. The evening before we moved in he went for something to his neighbor Předot and he left a burning candle on his desk because he thought that he’d be right back. When he was coming back to the house, he was stopped by soldiers who told him that he couldn’t go back to his house because they were just having an exercise there. When he told them that he left a burning candle on his desk they told him to give them the keys and that they would blow it out themselves. But he wasn’t allowed to go there. It seemed really strange to him. In the end, he spent the night at his neighbor’s place. The next day – they had already arrived with our furniture – my dad was standing in front of the house with the gamekeeper who had lived in the house before. Suddenly, my dad noticed a narrow stretch of dry grass leading from one of the walls of the house to a nearby barn. He found it awkward. So he asked the gamekeeper if they had been digging there for something or what it could be. The gamekeeper had no idea but he just had a hook in his hand so they buried it into the ground in that place and found a wire. They followed the wire to the barn where they found a little box with a switch. My dad immediately knew what was going on and so he contacted the police and a little later some police pyrotechnics arrived and found explosives in the cellar of the house. The house was supposed to be blown up with us being inside. The pyrotechnics removed the explosives and blew them up outside on a meadow. Then, an investigation was started and our moving was temporarily interrupted and we stayed a bit longer in Zlatá Studna. The investigation later revealed that it was done by the soldiers from Zhůří. They did it because they were afraid that my dad would speak about their poaching. Therefore they wanted to get rid of him. I think that the investigation results weren’t communicated to my parents – they never really found out. My dad learned about it from a friend who worked with him at the police in Brno. He then went on to work at the Ministry of the Interior and it was him who gave him this information. He also told him to let it be and to be happy that it didn’t end in a catastrophe. So this is how it ended. But if their plan had worked out I wouldn’t be here today because as the pyrotechnics were describing it the whole building was supposed to explode. After they blew the explosives up it produced a huge crater in the ground of the meadow. And it was done in a very precise manner, everything was camouflaged very well except for that narrow path of dry grass that gave the whole plan away.”

  • "Those Germans with no post or property could stay there if they wanted. But gamekeepers, foresters, farmers with property, teachers, they all had to leave. But those forest workers could stay. So the people from Zlatá Studna left voluntarily. But they could not take very much of their property with them. They had to leave a lot of things behind. But in 1950 everyone still remaining in Zlatá Studna left. As soon as they left, the buildings had to be demolished, in order to make sure that the saboteurs could not hide in them. And that's how the village of Zlatá Studna was destroyed. Only the pub under the gamekeeper's lodge survived and only for a short while. The Czech National Museum built there what they called a biological station. Usually during the summer, various botanists, zoologists etc. came to explore plants and animals. They went to Mezilesní slať. Especially doctor Hanzák, a renowned zoologist, or the botanist Ivan Klášterský."

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    Vilémov u Šluknova, 03.10.2010

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Me and my sister had to sit on a sofa in the kitchen and a soldier with a machine gun was watching us

Steun Eduard
Steun Eduard
photo: Archiv E. Steuna

  Eduard Steun was born on June 21, 1946, in Literbach in Slavkovský les (Slavkovský forest). He was the last citizen born in this small, predominantly German town, that was already being evacuated at that point and that was finally razed to the ground in 1948 in the course of a military exercise. His father worked in Literbach as a forester and before that he served as a police officer in Bdeněves in western Bohemia, in Chvaly near Prague and in Beroun. He was imprisoned twice by the Nazis during the war. Shortly after he started working as a forester in Literbach, he discovered - while being on a patrol - a grave of twelve Jewish women, who died on a death march. After the liquidation of Literbach and two short stays in nearby villages the Steun family moved in 1949 to Zlatá Studna in Šumava (the Bohemian Forest), where Eduard’s father got a job as a forester. Therefore they lived in the vicinity of the state border with Bavaria, which was very busy back then as smugglers used to shake hands with secret agents there and the unhappy Czechoslovaks who wanted to spend the rest of their lives in the free world, usually started their journey by fleeing to Bavaria. Nearby Zlatá Studna in Zhůří, there was a military garrison and in the opposite direction there was a garrison of the border guards in Kvilda. People had to cover their windows at night so that it would not be possible for the saboteurs to use the lights as orientation points. The empty buildings that had been left behind by the expulsed Germans were demolished so that the saboteurs could not use them as a shelter. The Steun family’s gamekeeper’s lodge was regularly visited by the members of the State Security, who tried to get information or even searched the lodge and its surroundings. All of this was happening in the era of the human traffickers and their king - the King of the Bohemian Forest, the phenomenal trafficker Kilian Nowotný from the nearby village of Staré Huťě. Allegedly his 2000th journey ended tragically. Although severely wounded, he managed to escape back to Germany on his own. His three other companions weren’t so lucky. They were literally hunted and in the end all of them were arrested together with the Pösl family that lived in a secluded place in Torfstich on the fringe of Mezilesní Slaťě. They were arrested together with the traffickers because the fleeing men stopped at their house asking for help. Their house, which was located nearby the Steun’s family home, was plundered and burned down during that night. Although the members of the State Security have apparently turned their rage against the inhabitants of Torfstich, the Steun family was also affected. Their house was searched by soldiers armed with machine guns. The Steun family eventually moved to nearby Horská Kvilda. The moving itself was delayed because of a ‘small’ complication. The house was about to be blown up with landmines. Luckily, the Steun’s found out about it at the last moment thanks to a lucky accident. The mines were planted in the house by the soldiers from the garrison in Zhůří who had been earlier caught by Steun while poaching and they wanted to prevent trouble in this way. Like if all of this wasn’t enough, Eduard’s stepbrother boldly smuggled two fleeing German women across the border. He hid them in his cart and covered them with hay. He even stopped for a little chat with the border guards. In 1957 Eduard’s father died and the family left the Bohemian Forest.