“Yes, my granddaughter said not long ago:”You've been a long time ago, but you always refer to it as your home. I cannot understand that.” I always tell her: “You, that was such an incision in our lives that you cannot just push that aside. I have always felt that the first years were such: life was divided. A part of me was at home there, and the other part here. Over time, this has been wiped out, but in the beginning it was true.” Inge Ubrassek:”But it is also the case that we have spent the longest part of our lives here. And yet home there was so buried deep down and the situation so deeply hurt us. This we will carry with us until we die.” Friederike Frank:” Although we knew that it would have gone much worse. We would not be allowed to live in our house, they´d displace us..., we would have gone elsewhere in the Czech Republic, so briefly, things would have gone wrong for us. We had a good friend, the Weissedel, once told us that we had to stay there because she had to take care of her mother or aunt. She said, how a beautiful landscape could help her, the beautiful countryside, when everyone is gone. That was the difference; people were part of it.” R. Motzke: “Did she regrett that she could not go with you? "Frank: “Indeed, she did, yes.” Charlotte Geier: “She could not continue attending school; she could not go to school at all. “ Friederike Frank: “She had to work in the forest, plant trees, she got a rheumatism. “Charlotte Geier: “But also finished secondary school.”
Friederike Frank, née Urbassek, was born on 12th March, 1926. She lived in Jeseník in der Kirchgasse (Kostelní) no. 160. Friederike had two sons, four grandson and one great-grandchild. Friederike had a brother (born in 1923) and a sister Inge (born in 1933). The father was an elementary school director for boys (today‘s secondary school) in Jeseník. The mother was at home. Friederike had a harmonious childhood, which was interrupted by war events. After mobilization in 1938 the family escaped to their uncle in Vidnava. They were afraid that a war breaks out. They came back after the invasion of the German troops. Before the end of war in 1945 they fled from Jeseník, this time to Ostružná. There they met the Russian army, but they were friendly. After the war there was little food for the Germans. They had to beg in shops. Friederike had been forced to work in Olomouc since July 1945; mostly she did cleaning jobs and washed clothes, and lasted for about 7 months until February 1946. Her father was interned, ill-treated and severely injured in a prison camp because of his membership in the NSDAP. After his release, the family left Czechoslovakia with a transport. They moved to Kirchheim unter Teck in Germany. The father was allowed to work only as a manual helper. It was only after a few years later that he was allowed to teach again. Friederike worked as a seamstress. Shortly after the birth of the second child, her husband died of leukaemia. With the help of her parents, she managed everything. She often came back to Jeseník with her sister. Both kept a strong sense of home to the city.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
