"Nothing happened to me, nothing happened to us, we lived a normal, normal civilian life. The end of the war was a bit of a surprise for me, because suddenly from one day to the next everything was Czech - and I couldn't even speak a word of Czech."
"After the invasion of the Soviet liberation troops we were asked to emigrate too, also to Germany, as in fact all our acquaintances were. Either they were seeking it or they were already in Germany. Just after the Soviet troops entered, my sister died, just before. My father died six months later. So actually the emigration was very problematic. The authorities demanded a lot of documents - and before they could get all that, some time passed and in the meantime my father had just died - and it was so that my mother and I agreed that we would move out. It always took an awful long time to process the applications. And we had handed everything in, so a fortnight later we got a notice that it was closing, that it was actually no longer possible to move out, that it was not in the state's interest for us to move to Germany. I took it as a kind of a sign, and so we said, 'We'll stay here, then, with everything,' and we didn't try any more. So today I have to say that we did the wise thing, because I don't know how it would have turned out in Germany, because my friends who lived there still have a kind of homesickness, a kind of longing for the place where they were born, where they actually grew up. Even though they can come here often, it's not the same anymore. It's like when you have to replant an old tree, it doesn't really work."
"Because my mother was of Czech origin, she had parents like in Mšeno, so she did not have to go into exile. However, here in our neighborhood my aunts and uncles were mostly expelled from the house and my uncle and aunt lived below us, without children. When they came that they had to vacate the apartments, here across the street from us in the little house where my granddaughter and great-granddaughter now live, so actually the great-uncle, he died right on the day that World War II started, when it actually broke out on the Russian side. And then my aunt in '45, normally she was kicked out of the house, but really the way that she was kicked out was that she had a yellow fennec, so they beat her because she wouldn't move from my great aunt. Then she went to Germany - to the Eastern Zone."
Siegfried Weiss was born into a large family on 14 October 1933 in Jablonec nad Nisou. He came from a mixed marriage, his father was German, his mother was Czech from Mšeno. Part of his family was deported to Germany after the war, part of them voluntarily, part of them forcibly. His father had to enlist in the Wehrmacht during the war, where he served as a wounded carrier. After 1945, the family’s house was expropriated, and his mother, thanks to her Czech origin, was put in charge of it. Siegfried studied engraving at the industrial school in Jablonec and remained faithful to this profession all his life. At the end of the 1960s, the family considered moving to Germany, but after the Soviet invasion in 1968, at the time of the onset of normalisation, the authorities refused their request to emigrate. The situation was also affected by the fact that sister Krista and his father died shortly before August 1968. He has written books about the Jizera Mountains, for example, Moje důvěrné krajiny – Ve stínu Ještědu (My Intimate Landscapes - In the Shadow of Ještěd) and Píseň o lese (Song of the Forest). Siegfried Weiss died on 14 September 2022.