"Then it was just the two women, my grandmother and my mother, with me, and on 8 May 1945, we went to the cellar, and we didn't stay there long. We didn't know what was going to happen. First, my mother asked on the phone, why should we go to the cellar? A few seconds of silence, and then the superintendent said, 'The Russian army is coming to Prague.' Well, we were in the cellar for half an hour, and there were two suitcases packed, military suitcases, which I still have. My grandfather had these strong suitcases made of vulcanized fiber, which they sat on afterward in the internment train, so it was a strong material. And then after half an hour they drove them out of the basement, and I still remember that my grandmother, who was probably carrying one of those suitcases too, wasn't walking fast enough, she was getting old, so they kicked her in the buttocks so that she flew against the wall. She said she had an ankle.... she could hardly walk for a long time. So they threw her out on the street by force. My mother then had to [repair] the torn-up pavement. The streets were not asphalted then, so the paving stones piled up to form a barricade for the tanks that were coming, the people who were already on the street and others who were coming had to stand in a line and then pass the stones on to the last one to put the stone back in place, and so it went on and on. Meanwhile, they had to stand with their hands up and lie down again in the rutted dirt of the road, and in the process, they were beaten with iron bars. My mother told me that all it took was one look, one pitying look at me - I was sitting there with my eyes wide open, I had light curly hair, and I guess I didn't know what was going on - she caught the pitying look of a Czech man. She called out to him, please take care of my baby and my mother, and she took off her gold watch and gave it to him. It would have been gone anyway. That was such a flashback. I'll have to tell you about that later because I might not have been here today. Sometimes, they used to beat kids that age against the wall too, or they would have made me a Czech girl."
"On 5 May, two orderlies, I don't know what their rank was, just two people, came to question my grandfather Leo Tietz about whether he had weapons. My grandfather was a great collector of art and antiques, and he had antique guns, halberds, vintage rifles that he collected, he showed them that, and also a browning that apparently they confiscated. He was then taken away for alleged questioning. He was supposed to come back the same day, but he never came back. Because of this, my mother and grandmother were, of course, very upset until 8 May. Unfortunately, my grandfather, as we later learned through various channels, having been in many, 14 different camps ourselves, we were told that Leo Tietze, Major Tietze, had been interned in Terezín, in the Terezín fortress and that he had perished there."
"Every time I come to Prague, I have ambiguous feelings. Everyone talks enthusiastically about how beautiful Prague is. The city is. I inadvertently feel a pang in my heart every time because I also think about what happened to us here, and it was a great injustice. It was terrible for my mother and grandmother, terrible. It was not about lost property. Many people lost things in the war, and houses were destroyed. What they took away from us was identity, the fact that one is an individual. My mother was somebody. Where we went to after that, we were just migrant wrecks."
Edith Ekanayake was born in Prague in 1943. She experienced the events of the end of the war and the expulsion of the German population from Czechoslovakia at a very young age. Mrs. Ekanayake’s family was one of the old German settlers in Bohemia, and her parents and grandparents were among the better-off of Prague society during the First Czechoslovak Republic. In May 1945, the witness lived with her mother and grandparents in Letná, Prague. Her father was at the battlefront at the time. The family first lost their grandfather on 5 May, who was taken away for interrogation and never came back - after internment at Strahov Stadium, he perished in Terezín’s Small Fortress. On the morning of 8 May 1945, little Edith, her mother, and grandmother were thrown out into the street with only two evacuation suitcases. In the months that followed, mother and daughter reportedly passed through a total of 14 different camps in both Czechoslovakia and Germany, but Ms. Ekanayake does not know their names. She also only knows about the harsh conditions they lived in from the accounts of her mother and grandmother. Due to the constant lack of food, she was very malnourished, and her mother and grandmother would gather crusts of bread or discarded bones and cook soup for her.
But even after their deportation to Bavaria in May 1946, their situation did not improve much at first. They were given accommodation with a farmer, and for many years, they also encountered misunderstanding and condemnation from the local settlers.
Edith Ekanayake says that she has been dealing with the consequences of this period all her life. However, she learned to overcome the difficulties and lived a prosperous and active life. She enjoyed sports and traveled extensively, spending several years in Srí Lanka with her then-husband, who was from there. She visits the Czech Republic regularly and feels a powerful connection to the country and especially to Prague. But she says she always feels a pang in her heart because she has to think about what happened to her family here.
