“When it was postponed, that was something! I don't know how those people got to us, but they walked with backpacks from cottage to cottage. The houses were sealed, but they opened them. They walked one by one and took what they liked. Only some settled here. We lived at the end of the village. Dad built a nice cottage. My mom and I were home alone, and suddenly a man came and said, 'I will live here. You have to clear it!´ Mum defended us:´But we are no Germans.´ The man said: 'But here it is written that there are Germans living here!' Mum kept explaining that Němec is actually our surname. We were crying, we were afraid of being moved out. Those people continued to walk in, steal and take.”
“At that time my dad was locked up in Opava. He worked in SA units for a year and a half. He was digging graves in the Opava cemetery with other prisoners there. There is a huge monument to the Soviet soldiers, who died there. They were locked in the barracks in Olomoucká Street and went to work in the cemetery. We regularly visited dad on a bike. We used to bring him clean clothing, a piece of butter, or something to eat. We came there once, and the guard said no one was here, that the prisoners would come later. We wanted to wait there, but he threw us out on the street. We asked where they would come from, sat on the grass, and waited. Suddenly I saw there were a lot of people there. The prisoners were also returning to the barracks. These people began to spit at them and swore them ´Germanic whores´. I thought maybe they weren't even people. Dad and the others arrived with spit. They had to bear it.”
“We slept with a farmer at night when someone was banging on the door. A soldier came and knelt by my mother. There were about fifteen of us, lying on the ground. Brother Evald laid on one side beside the mother, me on the other. He knelt by his mother and said, 'Give me!' The mother just covered her face with her hands. He said, 'Give me!' She did nothing. So he pulled out his gun and shot it in the ceiling. What a dust! Then my mother went out with him crying. And a grandfather who was there with us got up, turned on the lamp, and went out to find our mom. He found her outside lying on the stairs.”
Richard Němec was born on January 8, 1931 in Sudice in the Hlučín Region. After the annexation of the area to the German Third Reich, his father had to enlist in Hitler‘s army. Like other village boys, Richard was a member of Hitlerjugend. He was shocked to see the transport of people to Auschwitz in Racibórz. In March 1945 he fled from the front to the inland with his mother and younger siblings. His mother was raped by a Soviet soldier. Sudice was liberated as the first municipality of the occupied territory of Bohemia and Moravia on 28 March. The defensive line of German troops was broken through the Red Army in mid-April. After returning from the front his father went to the camp for the Germans, and then he was sentenced and imprisoned. The witness experienced the post-war violence against the Germans and the expulsion of part of the population to Germany. In the early 1950s he was enlisted in the army to the auxiliary technical battalions. In 1959 he was sentenced to a year and a half in prison for promoting fascism on the basis of a fabricated accusation. He served most of his sentence in Příbram. In 1991 he was fully rehabilitated and became a member of the Confederation of Political Prisoners. Richard Němec died in September 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!
