František Tendl

* 1938

  • “Grandmother went to see her son Rudolf to Wroclaw just before the Christmas holiday in 1944. She took the upper train route via Gluchołazy. Grandma was already sixty-five at that time. She took his civilian clothes with her to help him escape and return home with her. I will now digress... I spoke to one Czech man from Šumwald here, who had been doing forced labour in Germany. He worked as a stoker in a steam locomotive and he served on the route between Berlin and Wroclaw. He said that there was a lot of fighting when the Soviets began their attacks on Odra. He was afraid. He had a reason to, because there were police checks everywhere and as a deserter he would have been sentenced to death. But grandma said that many people had passed and nobody checked their documents. She was not successful and she returned home without him, because he urged her to go back quickly because they were about to blast the railway bridges and she then would not be able to get home anymore. She managed to leave just in time and she came back home. We later searched for him through the Red Cross. Nobody found out anything. He is missing. He probably got killed during that massacre in Wroclaw.”

  • “Grandpa had a unique double-case Doxy clock hanging on the cupboard. A Russian soldier came in and saw the clock and he took it. He went away and he did not care about anything else. I myself saw a Russian going on a horse-driven wagon with a huge trunk dial clock tied on his back. He probably wanted to take it home. They were after watches. Some of them had their wrists full of watches. I don’t remember that there were any soldiers of Asian descent here.”

  • “Certain Mrs. Gabrielová, who was my father’s relative, had four sons. Osvald stayed here and two of them died. One got killed in Wroclaw and the other in Kerch in Crimea. We received photos from him and a letter from an officer who then wrote to my grandma and told her about how he had died. He dated a girl from Dobřečov. He carried her photo together with his documents. Shrapnel hit his wallet and penetrated the photograph as well. This former fiancée of him still comes to visit us. She is still alive in Germany and she is ninety-three years old. She later married another man in Germany.”

  • “There were two of them, but I don’t know what they had done. What I saw with my own eyes was that they were digging a hole with a small coal shovel as punishment. Their fingers were all broken. I could see blood and open wounds. Had they done something wrong there? Were they digging their own grave? I don’t know. I only remember that the shovel broke after a while and they were digging the ground with their bare hands.”

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    Oskava, Bedřichov, 09.06.2015

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The last native

František Tendl -1940
František Tendl -1940
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

  František Tendl was born February 17, 1938 in Bedřichov (Friedrichsdorf in German). He has spent his entire life in this small village located in the protected landscape area Jeseníky and he is now its last German national. His two uncles died in the wehrmacht in WWII. František‘s father was not drafted to the army only because he was indispensable for the operation of the local machinery factory. František Tendl often mentions this now defunct factory in his narrative. The very first aircraft engine in Austria-Hungary was produced in this factory and František later kept in touch through letters with the factory‘s former owner Robert Weber for many years. In 1946 their whole family was taken to the assembly camp at the chateau in Janovice, but about a week later they were excluded from the deportations of Germans because his father was needed in the factory, and they were thus allowed to return to Bedřichov.