“And one day I got this note from Dečín, so here you go…come get your papers. So I came, and there was this strange guy who came to me, asking me how to do this: how to get to Germany. I told him to fill out all the papers and wait for thirteen years, then he’d be free to go. And he says, ‘Usually, we give people two or three months to get their stuff done. You have five days to settle your things.’ So, I had to sell everything I had, then I had to pay a ransom, because it was not easy to leave the Czechoslovak Republic. I had to pay for everything. That was a lot at that time, about a three-months’ salary. I had to start selling quickly and within five days I was out.”
“How did you leave?” “By train!”
“And what did you take with you?” “Two bags and 16 marks in small change. What happened to the money from the sale of the property and so on? Some of it, I spent on alcohol, some I donated, and I… I had nothing. After I arrived, all I had was… In one bag, I had a sleeping-bag and some laundry in the other.” -“And that was in what year?” “That was in October 1982.”
“And you actually wanted to do this since '68?” “Yes, that’s where it started, as I just found out that for us, for the Germans, there was nothing in this country that we could do to keep us alive.”
“Grandfather’s property was to be taken over by the state. And as it went, the so-called national administrators took over the factories. Some of them knew what they were doing because they knew the business. But sometimes, there were just barbers who took over a huge machine factory. A barber! But he had a good record. And we got one of them, Josef Šír, as a state administrator. The guy didn’t understand anything. Later it turned out he was some kind of murderer. I remember, as a three-year-old, I was upstairs in the bedroom, and his wife was in this semi-uniform with a gun hanging from her belt. She was yelling at the door, as there used to be this door here. ‘What she wanted, I don’t remember.’ And this man, Šír, he smoked, although you weren’t allowed to smoke in the textile factory, but he smoked all the time. He would smell of this cigarette smoke. He would steal all the unique technical books, he would take money from the company’s coffers and understood absolutely nothing.”
"Both my father and grandfather were not fit for the military service, so they had to do this so-called substitute service. And they had to join the fire department. And the fire department had those meetings down at the town hall. It's even recorded in the official records. And one time, they would come unshaven, they were wearing slippers and civilian clothes. And they ostentatiously refused to raise their hand to this Nazi salute. As they considered it stupid, for real. Raising your hand anywhere was something they found just idiotic. A denunciation followed. First they would arrest my grandfather, for six weeks, that was the basic rate, six weeks. Anyone who got more than that ended up in a concentration camp. Those six weeks were for you to diecide. He also had to pay some protection fee, thousand Reichsmarks maybe, that was a lot of money. The Gestapo was in Varnsdorf, but here in Rumburk, there ceertainly wasn't any of them. And the SS wasn't here either, some of the the SA were here, they woulld go on a rampage. So my grandfather had to go to prison in Varnsdorf for six weeks."
The first to come to the Sudentenland was the rabble. Czechs would burn all those old paintings, or they would put them in barns, where they kept geese or other animals
Tomáš – or Thomas – Titze came from a German family of weavers that had lived in Horní Jindřichov, formerly Oberhennersdorf, near the city of Rumburk in North Bohemia, for over four hundred years. He was born on 2 September 1945. His grandparents tried to emigrate to Sweden in 1938, but the Nazi occupation and the beginning of the war made their plans impossible. His family owned a textile factory in Rumburk, which had been taken over by a national administrator after 1948. Two years later, the state took over the company. After the August 1968 invasion, Tomáš Titze had no more reason for staying in Czechoslovakia, so he applied for emigration to Germany. However, because he had a record of being politically unreliable, it took thirteen more years before the authorities allowed him to emigrate. Within five days he had to leave Czechoslovakia, leaving his native Rumburk with just two bags of personal belongings and sixteen German marks in his pocket. In Germany, he did what he could to survive. There, being no longer a young man, he met his future wife, Dana. They had no children. In 2005, he returned to the Czech Republic, to his parents’ and grandparents’ house. He died on 31 January 2023 in Rumburk.
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!
