“The order was issued in the days when my husband was at home. He was recovering from his wound. By then, he had fully recovered and his arm was alright again. The order said that all women and children (by then, I already had a child), were to leave Jablonec as the eastern front line was moving closer and it was allegedly too dangerous to stay there. My husband had just enough time to accompany me to the station. Then he had to return to his unit again. They dropped us off in Karlovy Vary and he stayed two more nights there with me before he left and joined the ranks again in Míšeň. In Karlovy Vary, I was accommodated at the place of a family that lived in a house. Then came the air strike on Dresden and we saw the bombers flying to Dresden. I thought that it didn’t make any difference if I died in Karlovy Vary or in Jablonec, the only difference being that Jablonec was my home. So we packed our things and boarded a train to Děčín. We got to Děčín right on the first train. It was a terrible ride but we somehow made it. In Děčín, we had to wait all night long for the next train that took us to another station. In the meanwhile, there was another raid of these low flying bombers. They damaged our stroller but we escaped unharmed. From there, we went to Liberec, where I finally lost my patience and decided to get off and continue on foot. So with the stroller, the baby and the baggage, we went on foot towards home. I knew it would take at least two hours but I walked and finally we arrived home. My mother was awfully happy to see us back home. She told me that it had been a reasonable decision. For the rest of the war, we went into hiding at my parents place in Rýnovice. This was because in my flat, there were some other people accommodated in the meanwhile. They’d not leave any flat free. So I stayed with my mother in Rýnovice.”
Margareta Bauer was born in 1923 in Mšeno nad Nisou in a German family. Her parents worked in a factory producing glass rods and in 1927 moved to nearby Rýnovice, not far away from Jablonec nad Nisou. Her father was a communist and the whole family resented the Nazis. After leaving school, Margareta Bauer graduated from a business school in Jablonec nad Nisou, whereupon she found a job with a local trade union representing the local artisans and tradesmen (the so-called “Kreishandwerkerschaft”). With the advent of National Socialism, the social-democratic unions were forcibly merged into a new umbrella labor organization called the “Deutsche Arbeitsfront” (DAF). Margareta continued to go about her job within this new organization. In 1941, she joined the so-called Imperial Labor Service (the “Reichsarbeitsdienst” or RAD), after which she was supposed to have been assigned to an intelligence-service unit called “Blitzmädel”. However, she was spared the service in this unit thanks to her marriage to Friedrich Bauer on February 1, 1942. Her husband joined the army and fought on the Eastern Front, where he was wounded, but through a series of fortunate developments, he was lucky enough to survive the war. After the war, he passed into Russian captivity and only returned to his family in December 1947. Bauer’s family was among the displaced Germans. In the beginning of the 1950s, they moved to Tisá near Ústí nad Labem. Margareta Bauer and her husband raised three children. Today, she is a widow and lives in Ústí nad Labem. She used to devote a large part of her energy and time to nurturing those Sudeten Germans, who evaded displacement based on their track record throughout the war. For her contribution, in November 26, 2013, Margareta Bauer was awarded the Medal of Adalbert Stifter.
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