“They took all the guys from here and they sent them to the camp in Adolfovice. We were then waiting for him in Mikulovice (the assembly camp in Muna Mikulovice, auth.’s note). We didn’t want to leave without daddy. We were waiting for his release. But daddy was quite ill, and he arrived to Mikulovice quite late, on November 2. There were no more transports dispatched after that. The last transport to Germany departed at the end of October. We thus stayed in the camp and nearly all the Germans were already away. There were just some other families from Buková who were still waiting in the camp. Their sons were working in the mines in Ostrava, and they were waiting for them. Here at the farm (Buková), there was an administrator who came to the camp in Mikulovice, and who picked all the Germans who had come there from Buková and who were still there, and we thus returned home to Buková.”
“The farmer provided a tractor with a wagon attached. They took us all the way to the Eagle Mountains. It was in March, and the roads in the mountains were still covered with ice. The tractor skid and the wagon turned over into a deep ditch. Just think of it, there were about twenty of us, with children, riding in that wagon. My sister and I had babies who were still in swaddle blankets . He was born in December and we were evacuated in March. The wagon turned over. Everything went upside down, the suitcases, baby prams, everything. There were old people, and none of them were hurt. I only hurt my ear, it was slightly torn off, but it healed again. We could not find the babies. They fell out of the prams. We feared that they were dead. We went through all the stuff and then we eventually found them lying among roof beams still in their swaddle blankets. Nothing happened to them.”
“We had to do a roll call every day. Then they would separate us. The farmers were already waiting for us to help them dig potatoes or help in some other way. One day I was in some shop and I had to wash the clothes there. But I cannot complain about anything. Perhaps it was better for us when we could go to work because we would always get something there. Or when we were picking potatoes, we were allowed to take a few of them at least, and cook them ourselves. In the camp we were getting only black coffee and a piece of bread. My Erich and my sister’s son were only one and a half years old. They were always looking forward to us cooking the potatoes, and they would eat them all, including the skins. So hungry were they.”
“On the following day they made them keep going again. Somewhere in Moravia they had to work for the farmers there. She didn’t even have proper shoes. She didn’t have anything. Do you know what they did with the boy? They tied him to a doghouse so that he would not run away. Aunt had to go to work in the field. The boy spent the whole day tied with the dog. Then he would sleep in a haystack with the aunt. They only had a blanket which they had received from our family here in Jeseník, and they used it to cover themselves with.”
Hermine Jetelinová, née Barfuss, was born December 20, 1923 in Buková (Buchsdorf in German). Her parents were German nationals. She has spent her entire life in this tiny village in the foothills of the Rychlebské (Reichensteiner) Mountains and now she is the last German native who lives there. Only twice was she forced to leave the village for a short time: for the first time at the end of the war during an evacuation of women, children and the elderly as a precaution against the advancing front, and for the second time in 1946, when she spent several months in the assembly camp in Muna Mikulovice. She and her parents and sister were eventually not included in the deportation of Germans and unlike the majority of their friends they remained in Buková. Hermine Jetelinová then kept working at the local state-owned farm until her retirement. After 1953 she married Czech Oldřich Jetelin. Some time in the late 1960s the couple applied for permission to leave and live with her relatives in West Germany, but the normalization government put a ban on these later departures of Germans from Czechoslovakia, and the family thus stayed in Buková. Hermine Jetelinová died on 1st July 2020.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
