Rudolf Reinold

“Towards the end of the war my sister fell ill. There was no medicine for us in 1945. There were no doctors, and it got so bad that she couldn’t even walk. My mother had to look after her day and night. We received the order that we had to go to Mikulovice. We put my sister on a couch and loaded her, couch and all, into the car which took us to Mikulovice. There were twenty-three of us in one room in Mikulovice. We came there in the evening. And the rest what we took with us, the thirty kilos, we had to hand in at the camp and we weren’t allowed to lock it. It had to be left all open, so they had the opportunity to rummage through it all and take their pick. We lost a lot of things from those thirty kilos. In the camp we had to start work at eight o’clock, we chopped wood for the soldiers heating, or secured water pipes against the frost. We were a group of four men, but I was the youngest. Sometimes we did work for the cops and then we were rewarded with a bit of bread and jam. It was always a jostle to get there, to get a piece of bread, because we only got a piece of bread like that once in two days. If we ate it in one or kept it for two days, that was our problem. Food was really bad there.”

“The end of the war was bad. Firstly, thousands of people came fleeing the front from Germany. They came with cows, horses, loaded wagons. They were used to the flatlands and here amongst the hills they weren’t able to keep their wagons in check because they didn’t have brakes. That was a big problem. My sister was already ill and we had people lodging with us. We stacked up some hay and the people slept on that. It was a lot of people. After a bit they started turning back again and fell directly into the hands of the Russians. First we had the refugees, then the German army. They went through Vlčice, over the mountains. There was a sea of them. Then nothing happened for two days and suddenly a huge commotion. I opened the door and the Russians were standing there. A whole convoy of Russians.”

“Then they were quartered in the manor house. They took from it whatever they could. Then the raping started. Two of the women were our neighbours. One young girl who was eighteen, and one who was the constable’s daughter. They took her to the manor and there she was raped by five men. The younger one had a baby after the raping, and that was born here.”

“In 1938 the third house from ours was a gendarmerie. At the time there was a heap of blokes there and they went at the cops. Our neighbour was a butcher and he had a pistol. He let off a shot behind the house. That was a signal. Then the cops came from Javorník by foot. They had weapons and they came all the way into Vlčice. There they were joined by our cops and they all marched off in the direction of Žulová, because the trains weren’t going any more, because they’d removed a section of the track in Velká Kraš so that the trains couldn’t pass through. And so the cops went by foot.”