“They were already all in the unified agricultural cooperative. My dad was already more than seventy years old and he did not want to join it, because the farm provided livelihood for our large family. They were thus exerting pressure on him in various ways. He had a field on a level terrain, but they took it away from him and instead they gave him a patch here and there. But his strength was diminishing and when we began to do our vocational training, there was no other option for daddy but to surrender the field to them. For example, the principal and his deputy from the school in Petrov threatened him. For me, these are moments that are still stuck in my head. I am not even able to attend school reunions, because it all comes back to me. These two men and probably somebody from the village administration office were coming to see him and threatening him that if he did not give them the field, he would go to prison. Can you imagine that? To go to prison when he had so many children? He thus signed the documents for them. Well, but this has not solved much. They issued an order to all of my three brothers: that one of them had to do his vocational training to work for the cooperative.”
“I only remember that the soldiers were chasing German girls from the neighbourhood. I was supposed to sleep in my bed, but I could hear terrible screaming from the outside, and I thus stood up in my bed. I could be about two or three (four) years old. I could see through the window that there were soldiers who were chasing the girls and the girls were screaming and running between the trees. Dad provided a place to hide for all of them. He had been in the First World War and he could speak Russian well, and as soon as he found out that the soldiers were Russians, he started yelling at them something which I could not understand. He turned the soldiers’ attention away and the girls meanwhile found a place to hide. He thus saved their lives. Dad then gave some bottle to the soldiers, because he knew the situation in Russia, and the soldiers thus forgot what they had originally come for.”
“We absolutely could not say a word against out neighbours. They all liked us and they all tried to help. We were helping them, too. I was playing with the children and thereby I was keeping an eye them and their moms could meanwhile work in the fields. Nobody knew anything, and then, all of a sudden, an order came. It was at half past six in the morning. I remember that I was getting up for school, and I could see our neighbours walking on the road. There were three more houses behind ours, and there was a fourth house in the field. They were walking and pushing a baby pram, they were dragging their children behind them, they were carrying rucksacks on their backs and they did not have anything else. I knew their name, but I don’t remember it anymore. I remember that one of the families was the Langsfeld family. I asked them where they were going and my mom was crying and she told me that they had to go to Germany.”
Valtraud Vejmolová, née Cikrytová, was born May 12, 1941 in the village Terezín (Theresienthal) as the fourth of eleven children of Rudolf and Josefa Cikryt. While her father had Czech ancestors, her mother was of Hungarian-German origin. The family lived in Terezín, which was a purely German village. All inhabitants from the village were included in the deportation of Germans in 1946, and only two Czech-German families - the Baum family and the Cikryt family - stayed, included Valtraud, who was five years old at that time. In spite of her young age she still remembers much from that period. They had enjoyed great relationships with their German neighbours, but the new postwar settlers did not accept them among themselves and they regarded them as Germans. Valtraud therefore experienced a lot of injustice from her schoolmates. Her siblings often rushed to help and the situation thus brought them even closer and they still continue to have close relationship. After the rise of the communist regime, Valtraud witnessed the establishing of the local unified agricultural cooperative. Her seventy-year-old father knew that the farm was the only way to provide for the family and he persistently kept refusing to surrender his two and a half hectares of land. The authorities therefore increased the delivery quotas of agricultural products for him, they exchanged his field for a lower quality land and they threatened him with imprisonment until he was left with no other option but to eventually surrender his farm. Valtraud Vejmolová learnt the seamstress‘s trade at the textile school in Jeseník after completing elementary school. For some time she worked in the company Moravolen Šumperk and then in the glassworks in Rapotín until her retirement. She lived in Terezín with her husband for many years, but no longer in her native house. She experienced the disastrous floods on the River Desná there in 1997. From 2002 she has been living in the small village Veleboř.
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!
