Waltraud Benová

"The relatives who were displaced tried to stay just behind the border. We are not far from the border. They were hungry, they had nothing and they were mostly standing by the border. How they communicated I don't know, but I know that our mother didn't have much property either, but she cooked potato soup and brought it to relatives at the border because they were hungry. Nobody wanted to be displaced because they were going into uncertainty, into bombed-out Germany, and nobody was waiting for them there."

"It wasn't so bad because when the sirens went off, we went to the basement. In the basement we had children's wicker chairs and we sat on them. We had a kerosene lamp. My mother would read to us or tell us stories, but she didn't read us fairy tales.She always read us stories of the Tolštejn knights and the whole area, from the silver mine. There was a silver mine near us. It was very nice. We always liked it when the sirens would go off." - "Did you enjoy the raids as a child?" - "We didn't find them dangerous. Mummy stayed calm. She wasn't horrified. We always experienced calm. Mummy had time to be with us during the raid."

"Well, yes, because those who were displaced, those who came to that bombed-out Germany, maybe they didn't get food stamps. And in Podluží, that Velveta, it's almost right on the border. And somehow it was arranged that those who could, came to the border from the other side and my mother cooked soup, potato soup, because we had fields on Křížová Mountain. That was, that was illegal, that was already all confiscated, but that was illegal... somehow we came to the potatoes, so she cooked a pot of potato soup, and then my brother and I, my sister and I had to stay at home, we were making a little house under the table, that's where we were hidden, and meanwhile they took the soup to the border."

"In the year forty-five I was six and my brother, who was older, they had taken him to school, he was four years older, but they didn't want me. So then my mother went there with me to the headmaster to take me to school, and he just kept saying, I remember that, he even just said, 'You're going to be displaced anyway, it's no use me taking her to school, you're going to be displaced anyway.' So in the forty-sixth year we were still there, well, so she went there with me again, every week, and finally when my mother wouldn't leave it, so he took me to the school. And my first day of school wasn't September 1, it wasn't until October 15. The German pupils were sitting in the last desks, nobody understood a word, and when we talked amongst ourselves, of course we were punished, that's was obvious. But in the third grade, by that time I knew so much Czech, I don't know what we did then, I wasn't alone, there were more of us, we all got a note in the student book. I was the only one with an A and I said, 'I don't care, my mom can't read it anyway!' Because she didn't know Czech."