A17 Driven out

Narrator: Agnes Loidolt
Reporter: Benjamin Loidolt

I was 17 years old and I lived with my parents and my two sisters in Waldkirchen, Austria. There we had a small farm.

One day we got a letter from Zlabings which said that my grandparents had died and that we should take care of their farm in Zlabings.

My father decided to emigrate to Zlabings. Within the next 2 days we left our old home and we only took the most necessary things with us, our 3 cows as well.

We hadn't been in Zlabings for three weeks when early in the morning we were told to stay in our houses and to to shut the doors and windows tightly because of the arriving of the Russian army.

The Russians came from Znaim (=Znojmo), they were here in the late afternoon. They stormed the houses and took the women. They moved into the village with tanks.

They told us to take everything - clothes, money, animals, all our belongings - with us and they drove us to the Austrian border to Fratres. There everything was taken away from us: clothes, money, cows; all our belongings.

The Russian soldiers moved on and we found shelter with a farmer, where I started to work as a farmhand.

My parents moved into an old farmhouse. My two siters both moved to Neubistritz, where they married.

I stayed in Fratres and there I met my husband. I moved to Immenschlag with him. There we worked together on our small farm.