"Lenora is beautiful, beautiful, there was a beautiful chateau there, the owner was Mr Kralik, a German, he has a beautiful tomb there in Horní Vltavice, but the chateau was stolen and I don't know what happened, we haven't been there for years. Dad had to leave there because of the communists. Because dad worked mainly at night and there was a madman who tore down the communist leaflets that they always put up there, and they blamed it on dad. Dad, in his life, if there was I don't know what hanging there, he wouldn't have noticed it because he never went to any party or anything like that, well, they just blamed him for tearing down those posters. So he quit his job and we moved to Teplice. In Lenora, they eventually found out who was doing it - it was some nutcase, and to light a fire, he would always tear off some newspapers, or rather, some reports, and use them as kindling! They figured it out and came back to my dad, asking him to return, but my dad said, not in a million years! He said he wouldn’t go back to be around people like that again."
"My parents applied (for repatriation), they moved us all in - when they gave us permission, some of us may not have gotten it, I don't know - so we went to Košice, where they loaded us into the cattle trucks, always two or three families, depending on how many of us there were, and we drove for maybe a week from Košice, and here we were divided up into the glassworks. It must have been terribly hard for my parents. We came to Annín, that's near Sušice, my brother was born in Sušice, and then from there, when he was about nine months old, we moved to Lenora. All the aunts, relatives and a lot of people, emigrants from Romania, were already there, so it was better there. To tell you the truth, the only Czechs there were a doctor, a teacher and a policeman, otherwise there were still Germans waiting to be evicted. The worst thing was that we, even as children, couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't learn Czech. It wasn't until later, when we were already going to school, otherwise it was hard for us kids, we couldn't learn, we couldn't go to school yet, and the ones who were already 13, 14 years old, they didn't go to school at all, they started working, all those kids, in those glass factories. In the paint shop, for example, my cousins worked in the paint shop, painting glass. We waited for them all to move out, we got apartments and then it was OK."
"It was terrible, I was in the hospital, I had scarlet fever, my dad went there to get me, all the doctors and nurses ran away, only the patients remained. I was five or six years old and there was another little boy, so he took me and the little boy and ran to where we lived in Turda. We couldn't get anything to eat, my mother was crying and saying what am I going to give them to eat, I have nothing here. The Germans were coming, they were already backing up because the Russians were coming, and a doctor was there, he gave her a box of chocolate and said, hey, give her a piece of that chocolate every hour and she'll last. So every hour I got one of those bars. And so we ran with the queue all the way to that Bystrá, to that Pădurea Neagră. Forest workers who cut down trees and worked in the forest. In those days the glassworks were heated with wood, nowadays with coal or gas. They were making wood for the glassworks so they could melt glass. There were a lot of Slovaks and Hungarians and all sorts of things, less Romanians, they did more farming, they were farmers, the glassworks didn't mean much to them, it was always the immigrants who worked in the glassworks."
Adelina Mohrmann was born on 24 November 1939 in Turda, Romania. Her mother Adéla, née Stöhrová, was Slovak. Her family left in the 1920s to work in the then new modern glass factory in Turda. Her father‘s family also found themselves in Romania. Josef Kollár was of Czech nationality, born into a glassmaking family in Ukraine. Adelina‘s parents married in 1937. They lived in Turda, but at the end of the war they fled to the countryside. They found refuge in a glass colony in Bystrá, near the border with Hungary. They applied for repatriation, and were allowed to return in 1947. They settled in Lenora. Adelina, who was 13 years old, started working in the glassworks there. She had no education, she started school late because of the war. She washed glass and later became a glass cutter. Her father was soon expelled from Lenora by the communists. The family found work in Teplice. Adelina met her husband, Pavel Mohrmann, in the glassworks. They married in 1960. Her husband was also a grinder and an excellent musician. He played bass in the orchestra in Moser. They had three children together, unfortunately the daughter died at the age of 10. Adelina Mohrmann worked at Moser for 35 long years. She retired in 1995. In the same year her husband died. Her grandchildren, who are following in their grandfather‘s footsteps and taking up music, make her happy. In 2023 she lived in Karlovy Vary.
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!
