Helena Paessler

* 1953

  • "We were sent by our parents - German schools were not allowed to exist, teaching German was practically not allowed to exist either, but then somehow in the late fifties, early sixties they allowed it, that the German language could be taught. But only in the afternoon, not in the normal classes, in the afternoon. And once a week on Tuesday afternoon in Teplice in Šanov there was a school, one teacher taught us there, so we children of Germans went there. The books were from East Germany, and we also laughed a little bit because they were building communism there too. But what was terrible for us was that the children who knew us, they threw stones at us and shouted after us, 'You German rats!'"

  • "Then when we went to school here, I told about the German rats in Teplice, so we were always together, my sister and I. Like twins. And then they put us in a gymnasium, and maybe the headmaster meant well, but we got one teacher, and she was also from the Sudetenland. And when it was the twenty-first of August, school started, here it's always the end of August. And the teacher came in, we had her in English, German and geography, and she stood up and said, 'Oh my God, I'm so excited. I'm so glad, it belongs to the Czechs, that now the Russians have taken over.' My sister, she always got up, we sat next to each other: 'Mrs. Dürbeck, what dare you say that?' And she left the classroom. So how did it end with my sister? She got an F in all her subjects - German, English, geography - at the end of the year."

  • "They kicked her out of the house. She didn't want to. So they chased her through the whole village of Sezemice and then... There was some kind of wall and she was just holding on there, and my grandmother - again, I know this from my dad, I don't know, but my dad said that my grandmother told this story - for days afterwards you could see the blood as my aunt was holding on. Because they wanted to kill her with lapidation. She still didn't die. She held on. And when she didn't die, when she was still there screaming in pain, they shot her."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Wiesbaden, 26.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:50:53
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Wiesbaden, 27.02.2023

    (audio)
    délka: 01:23:23
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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It is necessary to forget about hatred

Helena Paessler in 1973
Helena Paessler in 1973
zdroj: archiv pamětnice

Helena Paessler, née Kotz, was born on 11 July 1953 in Teplice, North Bohemia. Both her parents - Herbert and Gerda Kotz - were of German nationality. Helena‘s mother and part of her family were deported to Germany during 1945. Since the parents already knew each other, Herbert decided to smuggle Gerda back to Czechoslovakia in 1948, where he taught her Czech fluently within a few months. His family was cruelly affected by the post-war rampage of the Revolutionary Guards. Aunt Marie Kunzel was killed by lapidation in Sezemice immediately after she refused to be deported as a German. The guards also murdered her husband Josef and Herbert‘s uncle Emil Kunzel did not escape the massacre. Helena and her twin sister Krista grew up in a pervasive atmosphere of hatred for everything German. This was not the only reason why the family decided to apply for emigration to West Germany, where they actually ended up in 1965. Three years later, the two sisters were hit hard by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. During a visit to Teplice, Helena met the music publicist Jiří Černý, who encouraged her to meet Karel Kryl in Germany. This led to a friendship, but also to many years of cooperation with Czech dissent - Helena transported paper across the border for printing samizdat or exile books by authors banned by the regime. During 1979, she started working as an accountant in the Dialog bookshop, founded by the dissident Milan Horáček, and worked there until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.In addition, she successfully graduated as a teacher and pursued this profession in parallel.The central theme of her life is the reconciliation of Czechs and Sudeten Germans.Since 2021 she has been the chairwoman of the Seliger-Gemeinde, which brings together former Sudeten German refugees and Holocaust survivors.Helena Paessler lived in Wiesbaden, Germany, at the time of the interview (2023).