František Winter

* 1935

  • "How did it go. A few of the former partisans came there several times, two or three days in a row. We called them last-minute partisans because they were just scumbags who needed to take some things away. They arrived by car at the committee and called us individually. Everyone had to bring a radio from the house and hand it in, and everyone got beaten up before they left. Dad, he had his whole back bloodied. He said, 'There were two of them and they were just whipping from both sides.' Then the Russians came. They also moved into our bedroom and forced us upstairs. They changed our horses. They took one from us and left the other there, but it couldn't even be called a horse, it was an emaciated goat. They pulled the pigs out of the barn, gave them straw and roasted them. Well, they did whatever they wanted. On the other hand, I have to say that one is not surprised by them. They were probably hungry too. However, there were some here and there who saw younger women or girls and were eyeing them up. I know that one of them even dared to say they were going out together in the evening. They told it - whether it was ours or someone else - to the commander of the Russians, and he called the Russians and ordered that nothing like that would happen, and if so, he'd knock them out."

  • “Dad and the Wehrmacht. Because at that time, there was conscription, and dad had five brothers, including one half-brother who had to enlist as a minor. One brother was in the Wehrmacht, the other was in the Wehrmacht, and the third somehow disappeared, but I don't know where. Two fell—one somewhere near Ukrainian Sloviansk and another somewhere near Stalingrad. The third one did return, but not here, straight to Germany, to the western zone. And that's the one who owned the other farm down there that we had to take care of."

  • “I don’t know whether it was the Gestapo or not. It was at the very end of the war and the Russians were already here. They heard word about somebody burying something in the ground. Maybe it was the partisans trying to find something at the last minute. They took him and ordered him to dig a hole. Shouldn’t he find anything, it would be his grave, they said. The surface was hard, rock covered, but he had to keep digging. They came again the next day and he had to go digging again. Then they never showed up again. When the Russians came, they too our horses away. They’d also take our pigs and roasted them on straw so that they had something to eat. They kicked us out from our own flat and moved in themselves instead. We had to stay in the little room. It was like in war time”

  • “I was working on the field far away, almost at Krondörfl. We were sowing oat. When we came back home before noon that day, a commissioner and one more man were already waiting for us in our yard. The commissioner told my dad that that man was interested in our house. My dad told him that he had been told something else. My mom had supper ready for us inside the house but they wouldn’t even let us go inside and eat it. We had to disappear just the way we were. The only things we were allowed to take with us were the clothes we had on. Everything else, all of our belongings, had to stay in the house. Later we were given some things that belonged to the displaced Germans. They would move us from one place to another. The first stay was in a pub in Malá Morava, then we stayed across the street and the third place we stayed was in Vlašský at a saw mill, where my dad was hauling logs. Then the forest administration took over and we moved to Vojtíškov. That’s where I went to school.”

  • “As a boy, I had to gather the corn on a horse. We’d go to the field, my dad was in charge of one wagon, I had the other one. Sometimes, I managed to turn the wagon over which drove my dad mad at me. I had to work very hard since I was a little boy.”

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We had to move out wearing only the clothes we had on at that moment

František Winter
František Winter

František Winter was born on December 17, 1935, on the farm No. 86 in a village called Malá Morava (Klein Mohrau in German) as the eldest child of parents of German nationality. His parents owned a farm in the village with twenty-one hectares of agricultural and forest land. Since early on, he had to help his parents with farming and his childhood was mainly connected to work. His father spoke Czech very well and was very well connected and familiar with the Czech environment. That might have been one of the reasons why he disliked the Nazi ideology. His son Francis recalls that he had a lot of trouble under the Nazi occupation. In April 1946, the family was excluded from the expulsion of Germans with the promise that they would be able to stay on their farm. However, after just a month and a half they had to leave because their house was chosen by one of the new settlers. They could not even finish lunch when they were called on to leave. The new owner of the house plundered the house in ten years and later the house was torn down by engineer troops of the Czechoslovak army. The family then had to move several times before it could settle in nearby Vojtíšková. In 1959, František Winter married and moved to Hanušovice, where she still lives today.