Rudolf Hannawald

They came and we had to move into two rooms. Now, everything else belonged to them. We didn’t get anything at all. We had potatoes in the cellar, that got locked up and we had no access to them. I went to work as a farm hand to Mašek. He came from a mixed marriage, his mother was German. He took over the best farm in the village, it had been owned by the Pfeiffer family. He managed it well. We were friends, we talked in the Egerlandisch dialect, I took care of the horses, another one was from East Prussia, a former soldier who stayed here, he tended to the cattle. One day, the resistance took Mašek away, they claimed that he had been too friendly towards the Germans, and we never saw him again. He allegedly killed a pig without a permit, it was illegal, someone snitched on him. He had to go to Karlovy Vary for a court hearing and I then drove him back home in a horse-drawn cart. I always liked to ride to Karlovy Vary with horses, I had nice horses. Nice cart, too, decorated, I greatly enjoyed it that way. If it only could have stayed like that, that would be great. But it was not to last. The authorities knew that the Mašek family had friendly relations with the Germans so they had to leave. Those who took it [their farm] over, they disappeared one day as well. Mašek told me: ‘We have to leave, we are going to Mayerhöfen in Karlovy Vary.‘ I told him that the same move awaits us too. This way, many others left. More people left, they said that they couldn‘t tolerate the things that were going on there. Those were the good Czechs. We had good people among us and so did the Czechs.”