Růžena Knedlíková

"It's just that the little house, not on the square but at the crossroads in Albrechtice, was not that big and my grandmother had a small farm. First with two cows, then with one cow. She was still quite fit and of course she was not going to give up her home or her small farm. And so my father decided to take advantage of the opportunities that Czechoslovak Radio reported after the war - to settle at the empty borderlands after the departure, after eviction of German citizens from the whole of Šumava, Bavaria and the Bohemian Forest. So my father and my uncle, that is my brother-in-law, decided to come here to have a look and found a house, or of course more of unoccupied or empty houses, suitable for living. So they came here to the border area, to the village of Drmoul. And they could, I don't know if you can say, choose... But there were still a few empty houses that they could apply for and then they could bring their family to. So that's what happened then during 1946."

"When the war ended, there was a concentration of German soldiers to go back to Germany, I was about four and a half years old. So it happened that I took a stool and was waving the Czechoslovak flag from the window over the geraniums. And of course my grandmother said, 'Hurry up and take the girl away from the window, or they'll shoot the whole place up!' And it was also connected with the fact that towards the end of the war my mother and her seamstresses sewed Czechoslovak flags for the liberation. They also sewed little flags. That was what my grandmother was terribly afraid of."