"I was tiny, I was two years old. We didn't return until after the age of 48. My mother learned from the letter that her father had died here. And she really wanted to go home. However, Berlin did not give us any documents, everything was gone. We had no documents; we were completely without any resources. They were already counting on us to stay there, to turn us into Germans. When the pastor saw that his mother was brave, he asked her, whether she dared to cross the border with me illegally, that he had smugglers across the border. It so it happened that as we went with my mother, it was dark... it was already dark, the Ore Mountains up there, as the Czech Republic crosses to the German border, so there are deep forests. And we went that way with my mother and the headlights from the car against us. So Mom jumped into the ditch with me so she wouldn't catch us, and we stayed in that deep forest that night. They really caught us and it was the Czechs. My mother served them there for more than a week, served them on the border for about fourteen days, and in the meantime it was up to the ministry and the embassy in Germany to see if we were really Czechs. Well, in the end it was explained, in the end everything settled down and my uncle, the only one here in Opava, was the only one in the family with a car. So, he came to those borders to fetch us."
"They placed my mother on the farm as a maid. It was all sorts of things because the farm owner was not a good person. She made her mother know a lot that we were not Germans, that she was a maid. My mother went to church, there was a bit of it, there was a church in that village and my mother sang nicely, so the pastor wanted her to sing there as well. However, she asked for permission back, as was the end of the war, she wanted to go back home, that we were Czech, that we did not belong to Germany, that we wanted to go home. My father was not allowed to write at all so that she could write, so the pastor was so kind that my mother sent letters to the Czech Republic through him, and only after a year did my father find out where we were. It was really that cruel."
"In Opava and the Germans rioted here at the end of the war, because they had already seen that they probably lost the war. And I had a grandmother who married a German. My mother and I were visiting her, and now suddenly the Germans broke in with pistols, and now that we didn't ask much, they drove us to the train station at the eastern station. And it was called the last transport in Opava. Grandma was taken too, and then we were leaving. We didn't know where, no one knew anything. My dad didn't even know what was going on. We left, we couldn't leave a message, nothing. And my father didn't know where we were the whole year. And we went and my mother and I both got sick on that transport. I got a high fever. Then somewhere the train stopped and Grandma wanted to get some water to bring me. However, the train started, Grandma was running, and the other train ran over her legs. She died and my mother and I went on. Finally, the doctor told us that we had typhus. So they put us in the infirmary. And they thought, They will die. But my mother and I really got away with it."
Annelies Klapetková was born on September 27, 1943 in Opava. Towards the end of World War II, the Germans loaded her mother and grandmother into transport. Grandmother died on the way, her mother became a maid in Germany. After the war, they found themselves in Germany without an documents; a local priest helped to establish contact with their father, who remained in Opava and did not know the fate of the family at first. They returned with their mother only after 1948, when they crossed the border illegally. Annelies wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, but she could not play an musical instrument, so she trained as a hairdresser. She married, her husband worked in a waterworks. After a while, they moved to the village of Slavkov u Opavy, where they built a house.
