Erich Böhm

* 1938

  • “Next to our native house in Domašov there is a wooden house and the German military police moved in there. They were catching deserters in the forests. I saw them several times, they were standing against the wall of the house. They were sad and their heads were bowed. There would be ten of them, for instance. The German military police would then take them somewhere and shoot them there. They would execute their own soldiers, their deserters. It was at the end of April, at the beginning of May. Every two or three days they gathered new German deserters and then they would execute them and do away with them. It was sad to watch it. I remember it, because I have seen it.”

  • “Three days and three nights later the train arrived to the railway station in Třebíč. A lot of horse-drawn wagons and tractors were already waiting there. Farmers were waiting there in line, as if they were awaiting a delivery of coal but they were waiting for us. We had to open the car door and stand at the edge of the train car like Jews when they were transported to Auschwitz. They were looking at us and assessing whether there were families capable of work. We were four children, my mom had the three-month-old baby in her arms, and they were thus passing around us and nobody wanted us. What eventually happened was that they picked all the other people and took them to farms for work, and we were the only ones who remained there. Nobody wanted us.”

  • “They found a place for us in the brick-kiln in Ptáčov. They ordered a Czech administrator to accommodate us there. We were assigned a room on the ground floor. When it rained, there was mud all the time, and when it didn’t rain, there was dust all the time. Trucks were constantly passing by our windows. There was shit everywhere, because before we came in, the administrator chased out hens from the room and he told us: ‘You can now stay here.’ We thus settled in and my father started doing heavy work in the brickworks although he was not capable of working. They were swearing at us, which for my mom was difficult to bear. When they moved us in there, they told us that from then on we could sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.’”

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    Šumperk, Zábřeh, 20.01.2016

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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Local farmers selected German families at the train station in Třebíč and took them with them, but we were the only ones whom nobody wanted

Erich Böhm as a young man
Erich Böhm as a young man
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Erich Böhm was born April 30, 1938 to German parents in Horní Lipová, but he spent his childhood in Domašov. During WWII, his father once failed to participate in a training of Volkssturm since he was busy at work, and as a punishment he was forced to join the Wehrmacht. Erich‘s father then served as a warden in a prisoners‘ camp, but several months later he was released from the army for health reasons and he returned home immediately before the end of the war. With a few exceptions, all the inhabitants of Domašov were deported to Germany in 1946. The Böhm family stayed, because Erich‘s father who was a local postman was needed there to train a Czech postmaster. When he completed his task in May 1948, Erich‘s parents, their three children and a three-month-old infant were loaded in a train car and transported to the Třebíč region to work in agriculture there. However, none of the local farmers were interested in a family with so many children, and so they were placed to a brick-kiln in Ptáčov, where they stayed in horrible conditions without drinkable water. Only after Erich‘s mother hard effort and an intervention of the Red Cross they were eventually allowed to return home five months later. Erich Böhm, who could not speak Czech at all, finally began attending the first grade of elementary school when he was ten and a half years old. After elementary school he continued at the Secondary School of Agriculture in Šumperk and then he began working in the Transport Company in the then Gottwaldov (present-day Zlín) and later in the Energy Distribution Company in Zábřeh. He eventually relocated to Zábřeh and he continued working in this company until his retirement. In 1960 he married Emilie Jahnová and together they have been living in Zábřeh since that time.