Relations between Germans and Czechs before World War II were not bad
Stáhnout obrázek
Marianne Kreul was born on 23 December 1927 in the Lusatian town of Zittau, her mother was a Sudeten German from Liberec. Her life story is also the story of the German-Czech border and its changing forms during the 20th century. Marianne Kreul remembers pre-war conditions, the occupation of the Sudetenland by Hitler‘s Germany and the war, at the end of which she and her mother had to flee because the Nazis declared the industrial town of Zittau a fortress that must not be surrendered to the advancing Red Army. They found refuge on Czech territory in the then Sudetenland. Marianne Kreul also experienced post-war poverty, the expulsion of the German population from Poland and Czechoslovakia, which also affected her relatives, and the establishment of the German Democratic Republic on the basis of the Soviet occupation zone of Germany. While Zittau and Liberec were separated by an impenetrable border with barbed wire for 15 years after the war, Marianne studied teaching in the completely bombed-out Dresden. However, her Czech roots still awakened her interest in the Czech Republic, where she regularly went on holiday. She was also at Máchovo jezero in Doksy on August 21, 1968, when the invasion of Czechoslovakia by „brotherly“ troops took place. The invasion came, among other things, from the GDR, Marianne‘s homeland, across the German-Czech border.
