“From Saxony I tried to get my mother to Bavaria as it was a Russian province. Also she needed a departure permit to be entitled to alimentary tickets. My mother was displaced from Czechoslovakia to Saxony at the very end of 1946 or at the beginning of 1947. First she had to stay at home to train Czech women in the factory. We were corresponding together, and she got almost all my letters, but I received none of hers. I was not so easy to get her to Saxony. First I had to prove that my mother has arranged accommodation in Bavaria. The farmer I worked for, confirmed it for me, so I would sleep over with mum in my room. But that didn’t work out, so we transported her illegally.”
“So I came to Bavaria. Before I worked in state administration and here I had to work at a farmer, where also worked my brother. He was getting 15 Reichsmarks and I was paid 25. And then there was a Yugoslavian landowner and he was paying 35 Reichsmarks. The farmer was selling butter to a nearby Jewish lager, and was getting 100 Reichsmarks for half a kilo and was able to pay our salaries for two following months.”
“First we came to Czechoslovakia in 1985. Back then it was still terrible. Our sons and step-daughters came with us. Forty years past Hitler´s death. We went with Čedok, paid everything in advance and for example in a pub we experienced the following. We had a long table and a chair was missing so I went to borrow a chair from a neighbouring table. No one was sitting in the entire pub apart from us. But a waiter came to us shouting to return it. So I first had to ask, if I could borrow it. That was socialism. That´s how it was.”
Emil Klier as born on 3 July, 1926 in a village of Ottengrün (Otov in Czech) as one of three sons of Georg and Berta Klier. Following a sudden death of his father he got to children´s home, as him mother had to start working in a factory to support the family. In a children´s home he remained until school graduation. In December 1944 was summoned to Reicharbeitsdienst, where following an injury during army training he remained working in the office. In May 1945 he got to American war captivity and later to French and then to Austria. From there he legally got to Germany, where he stayed permanently. First he trained as a house painter and later moved to Bad Godesberg (today a city district of Bonn). In 1985 he visited his old native country for the first and the last time. He died on May 9, 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!
