Herta Mondeková

* 1930

  • “We used to go dancing to a pub called Pod lípami in Česká Ves. I used to work in Česká Ves but first I always had to put the kids to sleep and then I could go out and have fun. I arrived late and a moment later they were announcing that all the Germans must go outside. Later the other Germans were angry with me and told me not to come anymore and that right after I got there they were kicking all of us out. But it wasn’t like that, the way it happened was that I was late because I couldn’t just directly go there like the others, first I had to finish my own chores. I was seeing Láďa Vízner and there were three young men who dragged him outside and wanted to beat him up for dating a German woman. But someone got over there and stopped it from happening. But the following day he received a notice and had to go to Jeseník to pay a fine of five hundred crowns for dating a German. We still kept going to the parties, though.”

  • “The Czechs arrived and moved in. They walked from door to door. The women were hiding because they were afraid of them. One of them came to Gottwaldová, she lived in the front in our house. She still had a picture of her son in a military uniform and he was so kind that he took it down and told her to hide it or else another one would come by and she would get in trouble.”

  • “The village was called Trávník. I have to admit, we were not suffering. We had to work hard obviously. Our parents worked the field and father also had to take care of the horses and he was afraid of them. And I did everything, in the fields, in the sty. We spent two years at the farm but the farmer payed us very little. And my mother did not have insurance, we didn’t even know that. Then she went to the doctor’s and that’s where they found out.”

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    Jeseník, 15.02.2017

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He was fined for dating a German woman

Herta Bernertová (Mondeková)
Herta Bernertová (Mondeková)
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Herta Mondeková, née Bernertová, was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Adolfovice (Adelfsdorf in German) as the youngest child of three. Her parents were of German nationality. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was four years old and in 1940 her mother took the children to a manual worker‘s colony in Frývaldov (today‘s Jeseník, Freiwaldau in German). Europe was already at war and so in 1944 Herta‘s oldest brother Rudolf was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He was only about 160 centimetres tall and judging by his portrait photograph he looked more like a fifteen-year-old than an eighteen-year-old. Only a couple of months later, in November 1944 her mother received a letter saying that after a battle at the town of Gołdap, in north-eastern Poland, her son was filed as missing, which effectively meant that he was dead. It was during this time that Herta‘s second brother Erich was drafted too, at the young age of seventeen. He was later captured and spent some time in a prison camp in the American occupation zone in Austria. Following his release he could no longer return to Czechoslovakia and ended up settling in the town of Lörrach in the Federal Republic of Germany. He only managed to meet his mother twelve years after the war when she finally received a permission from the authorities to visit her son. After the war the family was not designated for expulsion but in 1948, during the relocation of the remaining Germans, they were sent to do agricultural work in the Kroměříž area. The family applied several times for a permission to leave for Germany, to no avail. They were allowed to return to Jeseník in 1953 after being awarded their Czechoslovakian citizenship again. From that point, Herta worked in the local textile factory until retirement. In 1957 she married Ladislav Mondek. He was one of the Romanian Slovaks who re-emigrated back to Czechoslovakia in 1947. As of 2017, Herta Mondeková still lived in Jeseník.