Otokar Löbl

* 1950

  • "In my words, it was a massacre. A massacre of people. Revenge. Revenge of mostly drunk people who passed through the front, who were told they could do it. Which comes from all the protocols, it was said: 'A good German is a dead German, and any German you kill now we won't have here next time.' It was a targeted prelude to clearing out the borderlands, it was ethnic cleansing."

  • "Dark, weird feeling. Because before, when we first went to Germany, I remember that there were still wooden barracks in part of the Cheb station, there was no station there yet. I'll never forget those dogs, they were still standing with bayonets every fifty meters next to the train that was passing by, back in 1958. And the dogs were barking. And now we were coming back at night, and it was pitch black at the border. I wrote something about it on the Mladá fronta blog. It was a strange feeling, kind of a mixed feeling, kind of like where I'm going back to, it's been almost twenty years, hasn't it. But then I realized I was in a different world. It wasn't that Czechoslovakia anymore, that city, because of what had changed from 1970 to 1990, it was something completely different. I think that normalization did more damage than the German occupation and than the fifties. The normalization left something in those people... It was terrible for me. Then I was in Žatec for the founding [meeting of the Civic Forum]. And they shouted: 'Go to Germany and mind your own business. We suffered here and you come here and you want to give us advice? Get lost!'"

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 14.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:59:51
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the 20th Century TV
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They said to me: ‚That‘s a Yid.‘ And when they had no other argument, they said: Yid and German.‘

Otokar Löbl during Eye Direct recording in Prague, 2022
Otokar Löbl during Eye Direct recording in Prague, 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Otokar Löbl was born on 13 October 1950 in Žatec into a German-Jewish family. His parents, Adolf and Anna, were married only a year or two before the outbreak of the World War II, and thus lived through very difficult years. His German mother was forced to divorce by the Gestapo, his Jewish father escaped transport only thanks to the help of an old comrade-in-arms from the Italian front in World War I, but the vast majority of his family did not survive the war. His mother‘s three sisters were Germans who had been deported to the American zone, and throughout Otokar‘s childhood he and his mother travelled to West Germany to visit them. After his father‘s death in 1967, he and his mother lived in Žatec for a few more years until the Helsinki Process allowed them to apply for eviction in 1970. Through the Nuremberg camp, they eventually made their way to relatives in Frankfurt, where Otokar set up a restaurant and family and his mother lived until 1990. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution, as soon as the borders were opened, they set off together on a journey to Czechoslovakia, which they had not been able to visit for almost two decades. Otokar Löbl is a member of the Žatec commissions and is engaged in research activities related to the post-war massacre of Germans in Postoloprty. He found his way to the Jewish religion as an adult and today he is trying to find ways to bring it closer to the younger generations. At the time of recording in 2022, he was still living with his family in Frankfurt.