Marie Budková

* 1936

  • "After the division of Germany with the Federal Republic - we lived right on the border - it was called the street Selbská - so since there was a ban on walking in and out and then a ban on living, so we had to leave this neighbourhood, which was beautiful with houses, and the gardens, because they demolished it all, except for the barracks in which the army and the custom officers lived."

  • "In April 1947, my mother decided to intercede with her sister, who lived in Nýřany, to give up living there (in Germany) and that, because I had health issues with my lungs, to return to Bohemia at least for year. So we went to Aš. And before we left, I said goodbye to my friends and classmates, and one of those classmates coincidentally had her birthday the same day as Hitler's and let us all know that she was Hitler's child and that he was a follower of Hitler, so I couldn't stand it anymore and I slapped her."

  • "Dad was a peaceful man, and when he sometimes got on the pass to his family, what was small for me or what I didn't wear anymore, but also, for example, the cutlery we had at home, because there was only wooden stuff there, he always took it to Ukraine. He served in Minsk and Smolensk and was quite a popular soldier because he didn't hurt anyone and was in the unit where they didn't kill or shoot, then somehow, I don't know how, he didn't come back from the job, from that construction site, and we were reported that he had drowned in the mud and thus did not return, he was formally declared dead and his stuff was sent in a wooden box to my mother's address. And my mother, whose Czech patriotism was awaken by the box containing those things and there was a picture of Hitler in it, so she smashed the picture on the corner of the box. The news came in 1943 or 1944, I don't know, but he got various thanks from the city for dying a heroic death, and my mother so she took it that he had actually done a good deed, which she could not understand."

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    Nýřany, 13.09.2013

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A broken portrait of Adolf Hitler

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zdroj: illustration

Marie Budková was born on March 26, 1936 in the town of Recklinghausen in what was then Germany. She lived in Nazi Germany until she was eleven years old. in the family of a Czech mother and a German father. Her father died in Soviet territory sometime between 1943 and 1944 while serving in the German organization Todt. Home Westphalia became the target of frequent air raids during the war years. After the war, in 1947, at the invitation of an aunt, they moved to the town of Aš in what was then Czechoslovakia.