At slave labour in
Czechoslovakia
By
Aida Baumbusch-Kraus
From Carlsbad,
Bohemia
The first time I was confronted
with farm work was when my German capitalist family was deported by the new
communist Czech government in 1947 to slave labor into the Interior of Bohemia at
a Czech farm.
The farm was picturesque
and large with old buildings. They farmed about 100 hectares with about another 20
hectares of forest. Unfortunately, there were no living quarters for our family and
so they assigned us to a goat stable. My mother fainted when she saw it. My father
(with the help of 2 deported Slovak families, who shared the same fate with us) had
their hands full. After seeing to my mother, they had to first fix two sagging
windows and put in a beam for the caved in ceiling. The brick floor was crusted
with goat manure. The two Slovak women and I grabbed buckets, scrapers and
brushes to clean the floor until the red brick underneath shone red and clean. My
father mixed chalk and water and gave the walls a new coating. It was then, that we
unloaded the few things the Czech militia had left us.
Luckily there was a large
workshop on the farm and my father and the Slovak men made bed frames to be filled
with straw mattresses, cabinets and repainted a table and chairs. From the first
time my father spoke with the Slovak families in his very cultured Hungarian, they
fondly respected him and from that time, they sheltered us from the most demanding
tasks. They deferred their respect to my father, to the total consternation of the
owner.
After the goat stable was clean,
safe and livable, my father installed a turbine in the creek, and so we had
electricity in our quarters, while the farmer did not. He wanted to take it away
from us, but did not know how. To forestall any such ideas in the future, my father
managed to increase the water-flow in the creek and installed yet another turbine,
and thanks to him, that farm was electrified also. In the evening, after
backbreaking fieldwork, my mother and I embroidered, crocheted and sewed, and in
time we had curtains, pretty daybeds made into couches, tablecloths, carpets and
wall hangings. The Czech grandfather of that family saw our place, and promptly
moved his rocking chair into our rooms, because it was the "best" place on that
farm. It was there that he read his newspapers - under our electric light, of
course.
All that year, my father's Czech
friend searched for us; he looked through all transport lists trying to find
us. However, he had checked only those transports going west. Little did he
anticipate, that we had been transported into the opposite direction – east.
At the end of that year, I nearly
lost my right arm to gangrene. While my parents were rescued through the friend, I
had to stay behind in the hospital for 17 long weeks with drainage tubes in my
arm. When they finally decided to amputate, a kind Austrian doctor told me about a
new medication called Penicillin; he helped me to escape from the hospital and wrote
a diagnosis in English. He was in contact with my father's friend, who made
arrangements for me to be transported from the hospital to my hometown Carlsbad.
The prescription was carried over
the border to an American Medical Unit. We hired a border runner who carried my
mother's largest blue diamond, which she had hidden in the heel of a shoe to trade
for Penicillin in West Germany. The border runner was gone for 2 weeks while red
stripes of infection started to run along my entire arm to the lymph nodes and into
the right breast. I was desperate! Luckily the border runner managed to return with
the vials! The Penicillin he had acquired with much effort was administered by a
German doctor and from day to day it was noticeable that the infection receded
and that my arm, that of an 18 year old girl, was saved.
