Rudolf Lux

We were on a field. I can’t remember what exactly we were doing there. There was snow on the ground, I know that, and then a dark limousine arrived with four men, like in the movies, they had some kind of black leather coats on and grabbed him. And they were gone. It was a Czech car, I saw as much. And then there was a lot of crying in that field. Mother couldn’t leave the children at home, she had to take them with her. I don’t know whether we were digging out the last of the potatoes, but it was something like that. It was almost January, but I couldn’t say exactly. I just know they arrested him. My mother cried after that, obviously. Our grandmother was there too I think, she cried as well. So it wasn’t anything easy, not even for us children, even though it didn’t hit us as hard, because he’d never been at home anyway. If they’d grabbed our mother that would’ve been worse. But our father felt more or less a stranger. He was always so prickly when he came home. He always had to pick up his first-born in his arms and that was terrible for me, I can still dimly remember it. He had a beard like I do today, it was very prickly. So my father wasn’t exactly what he should’ve been, he was almost never at home. ar.

Later on in the camp it was our mother, her mother and us five children in a single room, there was also a shower somewhere, but very primitive, if at all. Every four weeks we had to go out and stay outside overnight, because they were gassing the rooms to get rid of the bugs which were crawling everywhere, bedbugs, fleas, all sorts. Bedbugs were the most interesting, as a child. I had to sleep on the top bunk, because I was only just about able to climb up, the others couldn’t because these were triple-decker bunk beds. At any rate when they turned off the light and the room was even partially lit by moonlight, you could watch the bedbugs rustling about above you. They climbed up the wall, onto the ceiling and where they could feel the heat rising, that’s where they dropped down and suddenly you had a bedbug in your clothes. It was no problem for me, the bites were gone by the next day, but my sister? Oh she looked terrible! Covered in bites, from her head to her toes! They really liked the taste of her blood and her bites got inflamed. Another brother, the third one… We were pretty well fed, because our mother worked in the kitchen, but he never ate anything. Later when we came to the West, at fourteen years he was as small as an eleven-year-old, with a sparrow’s chest and sunken shoulders.

About the Russians in our house, our mother was alone at the time with five children, I still know about that. But I can only remember my mother’s terrible screams. In that way she, most likely, that’s how I interpreted it later, prevented her rape. By her furious screaming.

It was a rented inn of sorts, it was called Blaue Donau (Blue Danube), a public house with a small butcher’s. None of the places there were very big. In Jablonec yes, but there they had to cater to the glassworks. But it wasn’t like that in Loučná. And that Blaue Donau, after the war, for whatever reason, it was an old building, they pulled it down. You can still see the cellar and gallery, what’s left of it, but I haven’t tried digging there to see if there’s any beer left over or anything like that. But the interesting thing is, that instead of the tram line which they tore up as well, there’s a bus station and that’s still called Modrý Dunaj – Blaue Donau.