Egon Wiener

* 1947

  • "They thought my grandmother should be sent to the square like other Germans with a white armband to sweep the sidewalk and so on, which was what was happening at the time. Grandma did not convince anyone that the boy who was there was a hidden child, or that she was the mother of those who fought against Germany. And those Czechs behaved shamefully. They behaved in such a way that they forced my grandmother to do jobs that she would not have had to do after the liberation, but as a German she was forced to do them. In the summer of 1945, everybody met in Prague, whether it was grandfather Arthur, father’s brothers and father. They came to Hrádek at a time when grandmother was being humiliated and those who forced her to do jobs that were not hers scored an own goal. My relatives stepped out of the jeep wearing battledresses, the uniforms of foreign soldiers, and stood in front of the house where they were greeted by the Czechs who had taken over the pub. The relatives asked after my grandmother and were told that she was doing what Germans should be doing today. Scrub the toilets and other things they actually wanted us to do, they have to do today. It was such a blatant way of revenge for the Czechs who used to be humiliated. The relatives got out of the car and called all the people who humiliated my grandmother because she was German, and she told them that it was actually her children and her husband who came to Hrádek in those two jeeps. And that it is not really about whether she speaks German and has a German surname. And what happened was that the two uncles forced the two former Czech Ostarbeiters to leave in just their shorts and walk to the station. The relatives had a locomotive and a carriage shunted here and sent these shorts-wearing would-be Czechs home, saying that they did not get any of the Germans' gold or hidden valuables. They went away and probably never forgot in their lives the way they had been taught how to behave as human beings."

  • "When my mother would take his laundry to the Pečkárna, she would get it back bloody. For a while she did not even know if he was still alive and who she was bringing the laundry to, because nobody told her anything. And his resistance, which consisted of trying to raise funds to buy guns when they were boys in their twenties. Then someone turned them in. Then my father was interned in Sachsenhausen, but by that time my grandfather was no longer there. But the fact is that during the whole war, when he as a Jew was supposed to wear the Star of David, he never had it sewn on his clothes. His relatives who met him in Prague blamed him for not claiming his ancestry. The whole thing ended with the fact that in the synagogue in Liberec today you can see when and which train took to Auschwitz those of his cousins who were not ashamed of the yellow badge. My father never forgave himself."

  • "I know that I served the last few months in the Lower Barracks in Liberec, and when the Warsaw Pact troops entered Liberec on 21 August 1968, we as soldiers were guarding Ještěd. We were always sent one policeman, one soldier and one militiaman. We were given batons and we guarded the central places in the city, because at that time the Soviets came through Liberec, damaged part of the square in front of the town hall, and caused the death of many of our fellow citizens. They passed through and were no longer here, but still we, the soldiers, were actually guarding strategic places here. With batons, they took our weapons. We guarded Ještěd, we walked around in circles, and we were also in other places in the city centre so that we could be seen."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Liberec, 05.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 02:02:41
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Father neve forgave himself for being ashamed of yellow badge

Egon Wiener in 1978
Egon Wiener in 1978
zdroj: Archiv pamětníka

Egon Wiener was born on 27 March 1947 in Liberec into a mixed Czech-German-Jewish family. His relatives faced various forms of Nazi persecution during World War II, but all of them survived the end of the war. After finishing a five-year primary school in Liberec-Machnín, the witness went on to study at an eleven-year high school on today‘s Husova Street in Liberec, which he completed with a maturita exam in 1965. He then worked briefly as a revision worker at the national company TEXTIL Liberec. At this time, he also decided to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. In 1966, he started his basic compulsory military service with the tank division in Milovice, serving the last few months in the Liberec lower barracks. Here he also witnessed the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops on 21 August 1968, when he had to guard Ještěd and some strategic places in the centre of Liberec. Afterwards, he returned to the national company TEXTIL. After the foundation of the Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union (SSM), he started working as a secretary of the district committee of the SSM and in 1977 he was elected its chairman. From the second half of the 1970s, the State Security kept him as an agent. He denied that he had signed a cooperation agreement with it. Egon Wiener worked as the functionary of the SSM and then of the Union of Czechoslovak - Soviet Friendship for twenty years until the Velvet Revolution, after which he began freelancing. After his retirement he became the author of many publications. At the time of recording (2022) he lived in Jablonné v Podještědí.