Alena Fiedlerová

"[Uncle] - he was an employee of Czech Railways at the main station in Prague. When the radio called for help in 1945, the railway workers went to defend the radio. Opposite the radio, he earned a 'dum-dum' bullet, they then searched for how he died. He was survived by three children. My grandparents lived in Mnichovice, and also my mother's brother who lost his life at the radio station. His wife came in the morning to say he hadn't returned from work. My mother and grandfather went to Prague to look for him. They asked the employer at the main station where he might be, that he hadn't come back from work. There, they found out that the railroad workers had gone to defend the radio when it called for help. But that was all they knew."

"[My father] had a crash with the director of Jednota Broumov between Broumov and Police and they both ended up in hospital. There was a trial and my father was convicted because the director said he was an anti-communist and that he wanted to kill him. So he ended up in the mines in Jáchymov. That was around 1953, he was only there for about half a year. But in 1953 Gottwald had just died and his mother died in Pardubice, in Mateřov. Mother asked if he could go to the funeral. They said he could, but he would have to pay for an escort. Mummy said she would pay for it, that he should go to his mother's funeral. Only, as I reported, Gottwald had died and all funerals were forbidden. So the grandmother couldn't even be buried, the funeral didn't take place."

"The Reconciliation Monument in Horní Teplice... I didn't experience it myself because I was born in 1948. But I was quite interested in it, and our son studied history and chose to live in Teplice from '39 until 1945, so that's where the wild expulsion was also reflected. First of all, I was looking for books in Germany, because there was nothing in the archives here about it, so I also learned a lot about it. I guess I could go on and on. But what I know and remember is that when my husband's mother, when they were murdered in Horní Teplice afterwards, and then they had to dig them up on Buk Mountain, exhume them and take them to Srbská, and they had to bury them there, my husband's mother was looking out the window here when they were being taken away on a ladder truck and horses. And 22 children died there on the Buk Mountain. There were children there! And these were the first to be withdrawn to Germany, actually from Poland. Well, there was a Czech woman among them, the mother of a little girl, and there it was a kind of personal revenge of finance Riedel. And he included a total of 22 people, including her, in that deportation. They were sent to Poland, but the Polish side refused them, so they came back and they had to dig themselves a hole on Buk Mountain, and then they shot them there. So I read that it was Mr. Svoboda and Mr. Riedl. And this Mr. Riedl, it was a kind of personal revenge on the lady, the Czech. And they, when they went to the transport afterwards, or when they were ready, she, the Czech woman, lived in Dolní Teplice. My father from Hronov came to see her because the Czech woman's husband was at the front, the war was on, and he wasn't at home. Dad came to visit her, and then when they started the wild expulsion, they took her away and left her daddy and the little girl here. She lost her life, and she was Czech, but as I say, it was a personal revenge of one of the financiers. The little girl was brought up by her grandparents in Hronov. Well, it's complicated, and there's more to tell. The girl's daddy and the husband of the executed girl never came back from the front. He stayed in Germany. And then, as I mentioned, there was a trial in 1946, and that's where this Mr. Riedl, the financier with this Mr. Svoboda, had to confess. And they did convict them. And as I said, they had to exhume them and bury them properly. So they're buried in Srbská Street. And as it was wartime, they got this little condemnation, this 'scolding', but nothing happened to them."

"Well, what has changed in Teplice? We can say that practically nothing. Right now I'm looking out the window at the department store, the Verner store is downstairs. And there used to be a granary here, because there was a field here, and this is where the grain was stored in this granary, and this is where it was bagged, and then it was distributed where it was needed. And it was a national monument. And then the department store was built here and it hasn't been used as a department store for a long time, just the groceries downstairs and they sew textiles upstairs and it's kind of divided up in different ways. Well, otherwise it was Jednota, Jednota built it, it was a business under the last regime where they ran a convenience store. So they thought that because it was a tourist place that you could buy everything in that department store... This is where the granary went and then further on - there was a hardware store and housewares. So the house had to give way too. And next door, further on, the red one, the red brick one - there was a convenience store with groceries. And that's kind of the biggest change."

"I was living in Česká Lípa and then we moved back to my grandmother's house in Adršpach because they had a family house there. They came there in 1945, and my grandfather had a newsagent's there. And my dad was a national administrator in 1945, maybe it's too complicated for you. He ran a pub there and he ran a butcher shop there because he was a butcher. And the pub was in Adršpach in front of the present factory. Now it's called the Continental and that's where the pub was. And when the expulsion of the Germans started in '45, my father was there as a national administrator. So he experienced the expulsion of the Germans there, and that was kind of cruel, too."