CZECH-L Archives
Archiver > CZECH > 2000-12 > 0975756954
From:
Subject: Re: [CZ] Article on 1945 massacre in Bohemia (oops)
Date: Sat, 02 Dec 2000 04:35:54 -0700
References: <004901c05bf2$ca8e23a0$02000003@oemcomputer>
Hi, Nicole -
I want thank you so much for putting this article on Landskron on the
CZECH Mailing List - even though I was really shaken by the vivid
description of the atrocities committed there in 1945 and the tears are
still running down my cheeks when I think back to those awful times.
After 55 years I finally learned the truth about what happened to so
many of my cousins in the Landskron area. Among the names of the
victims, both German and Czech ones, I recognized quite a few that occur
in my own family tree. And with some relief I also noticed that none of
"my" names showed up among the perpetrators of this massacre. -
Why? Why did that happen? It wasn't just Czechs against Germans - after
all, there are good ones and bad ones in every ethnic populationn and I
saw with my own eyes how well they got along with each other in this
particular community. And what is a half-breed like me to feel? I am
just torn to pieces!
I can see from your e-mail address, Nicole, that you must be a
descendant of the Julius and Hermine Kreuziger mentioned in the article
and that you are probably attending right now the University of
Wisconsin. Well, I am sure that you are, at least quietly to yourself,
thanking your parents or grandparents for leaving the blood-soaked earth
of Europe behind to emigrate and find a more peaceful life in the U.S. -
just as my grandchildren are thanking me (even openly and spontaneously)
for emigrating to Canada.
Just to let you know the reason why the article has moved me so much,
here is, briefly, my own story:
Most of my Steiner-ancestors have lived in the Landskron area since at
least 1650 - and that's why I had so many distant cousins there. Around
1870 my great-grandparents emigrated to the U.S. and settled in
Missouri, taking two of their three sons along, but leaving my
grandfather for whatever reason behind. We suspect it was because he had
a good job already or even "because of a girl", my grandmother. My
father was the sixth of their 9 children and moved shortly before WWI as
a young man to the then capital of the country, Vienna. He always seemed
to be homesick, though, as he remained a life-long member of the Vienna
Landskron Association. He married my mother, a Czech teacher from
Zdanice, in 1921 and eventually I was born in Vienna as the youngest of
four children. My father was visiting Landskron often as well as
frequently attending meetings of "The Landskroners". Sometimes he even
took me along too, so that I almost came to feel as if I were a
Landskroner myself. Yet all the while us children were all growing up
dreaming about joining some day our "Uncle in America". Then the Nazis
came and the war and eventually the air raids. By that time my older
sister had been drafted into a work camp, my twin brothers, barely 18,
were missing in action somewhere in France and I, as a 13-year old
school girl, was ordered to be sent to the country to escape the
relentless bombing. Luckily my father had managed to persuade his sister
Marie and her husband Cyrill Motl to take me in and so I spent the
summer and fall of 1944 on their farm on the Angerstrasse. It was quite
a change from the freezing Vienna girls' school with harsh Nazi teachers
and meager rations in the basement bomb shelter to the ample, healthy
food in my aunt's kitchen and the boisterous carefree environment of a
boys' High School where four of us lonely girls in the front row often
had our pigtails dipped into the inkwells of the classmates behind us.
Coming home from school, it was off with the shoes and a headlong dive
into farm work - cleaning the stables, putting the harness on the cows
to drive with my benevolently smirking Uncle into the fields to cut the
feed, bind the sheaves or harvest flax, potatoes or other produce. I did
my very best to keep up with my somewhat older cousin Friedl, but I
never succeeded to come even close to her capacity for hard work. She
and my aunt always commented approvingly on my efforts of trying to
convert myself from a city girl into a useful farm hand. I never heard a
discouraging word. They often showed me patiently their "tricks of the
trade" and eventually even my Uncle stopped his sometimes sarcastic
remarks about city slickers. During the day - school and hard work. And
in the evening - no radio or other entertainment, just talk. Still, I
felt privileged. I heard a lot about the neighbours, the neighbouring
villages, who was doing what - German or Czech, and often I wished that
my mother had taught me Czech as well so that I could be bilingual like
the rest of the people there. Within those few months I even adopted the
German accent of the region and I thought I lived in a congenial
environment where all people, regardless of their ethnic origin,
respected each other.
But those peaceful months soon came to an end. In February 1945 I was
called back to Vienna and had to pick my way alone for hours at night
from the railway station to our home through the rubble of a burning and
bomb-cratered city. No streetcars running, certainly no cabs available,
my parents didn't even know I was coming on this particular train
because of poor communication facilities. And, listening to the
terrifying howl of the sirens while stumbling dead-tired through the
deserted streets with my heavy suitcase, I was thinking of the friendly
people in the peaceful little town of Landskron I had to leave that
morning. Little did I know or even sense what tragedies would befall
those people only three months later.
In April 1945, when we already heard the artillery of the front
advancing toward the outskirts of Vienna, my father implored my mother
to flee with me to the West so I would escape being raped by the Russian
soldiers. We did. Becoming a refugee has probably saved my life, but it
has also caused us to lose all our belongings, all ties to the past. It
took me more than two years to settle into a reasonably normal life
again and go back to school. - Still, we considered ourselves lucky in
comparison to our relatives in the C.S.R. We heard about the unwarranted
cruel expulsion of the 3.5 million Sudeten-Germans and we felt for them.
But we couldn't help, we struggled ourselves to survive as best as we
could. Years later we managed to get back into contact with some of our
relatives again when they
had settled into new lives in Germany or Austria. I briefly visited
Uncle Motl and Aunt Marie in 1952 at their refuge in Bavaria while
hitchhiking through Europe during my summer holidays from University.
They had changed drastically. It seemed that in those 7 years since I
had seen them last, they had aged at least 37. In spite of their evident
disabilities they now had to do strenuous work as hired hands in a dairy
farm, just to survive. There was no more smile on my aunt's face, no
more smirk on my uncle's. Only sadness in their eyes, deep, forlorn
sadness. They seemed glad to see me, but they hardly talked, just
necessary niceties. - What a transformation! It was so obvious that even
I, an incorrigible Pollyanna, sensed it - their lives had been
destroyed, their will to live completely eroded.
I had just by chance read a little bit about the Landskron massacre at
the local university about 15 years ago and was shocked. But only today,
after reading this article that you so kindly shared with us, Nicole, I
can really understand why my aunt and uncle had changed so much. When
one has to go through the hell of watching one's former neighbours turn
into such bloodthirsty, sadistic savages and even get away with these
horrendous crimes scot-free because of a complacent or even approving
public authority, one certainly would lose one's faith in humanity. I am
not surprised to hear that so many people committed suicide, that sure
must have seemed the only way out. And then, after experiencing this
massacre and worn out from having to live months and years under such a
heavy-handed, cruel government, they had to in addition come to terms
with the trauma of being expelled from their ancestral homeland just for
being classified as a Sudeten-German. What is the crime in that? Where
is justice? Where is civilized behaviour? Who decided that all the
Sudeten-Germans, innocent or not, had to pay en masse for the atrocities
the Nazis had committed during their reign of terror all over Europe?
Who said it was all right to instigate ruthless ethnic cleansing on a
certain group of people as punishment for crimes that another group of
people had committed? -
I wonder, wouldn't the leaders of our present Western governments
nowadays condemn such large-scale ethnic cleansing as "crimes against
humanity" and haul the perpetrators of these inhumane actions into the
International Court?
Oh, well. I can't change history, I can only lament about it. Being half
Sudeten-German and half Czech (with a Viennese veneer and a Canadian
casing), I can only hope that we never again elect narrow-minded
hatemongers into our governments, even though such intolerance has a
tremendous appeal to the less intelligent and more to violence inclined
sectors of the electorate. Let's be tolerant of each other! In our
particular case as expatriate Landskroners, let's not hate ALL the
Czechs because some of their bad apples perpetrated the massacre and
let's not hate ALL the Germans because some of their bad apples
committed atrocities under the Nazi banner!
I apologize for the flood of emotions your posted link unleashed in me,
Nicole. Just reading about Ober-Johnsdorf, where some of my forebears
had farmed, visualizing the mentioned Angerstrasse where I had lived for
a while and recognizing the names of people I had come to know long,
long ago, all this also reminded me of my dear aunt and uncle whose sad
eyes at our last meeting I will never forget. They both passed away
shortly after my visit, probably happy that their ordeal with such
horrific memories was finally over. They are in a better world now. A
better world of universal tolerance and respect, one that I hope my
grandchildren will help create. Their heritage is even richer than mine
and encompasses three continents. So they just can't be parochial and
have to have a more expanded horizon. Let's help the younger generation
NOT to repeat the mistakes of the past and assist them in every way to
make a better future!
Good luck in your studies!
Elfriede (Steiner) Grillmair
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Nicole Kreuziger wrote:
>
> Oops! I forgot to paste the link to the article in my e-mail. Sorry!
> http://sudetengermans.freeyellow.com/TheDay.html
>
> Nicole Kreuziger
>
>
> ==== CZECH Mailing List ====
> THE CZECH-L SURNAMES LIST IS AT
> http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~elainetmaddox/
>
> email contact on the surnames webpage.
This thread: