[VideoView]

Hanna Goldmann

It is the poor, who have to leave
video length:
03:36
interviewer:
Ruth Deutschmann
photography:
Ben jamin Epp
copyright location:
Innsbruck
date of recording:
2008-06-17
English translation by:
Sylvia Manning - Baumgartner
Italian translation by:
Nicole D´Incecco
event
[1939-06-29] "Optants" and "stay there" Attitude change of the VKS (VB Kampfring South Tyrol) for resettlement: "(...) The German people of South Tyrol is leaving the old country and strikes to save and preserve his German nationality in the Greater German Reich a new home, the ancestors of justification and the youth the people's commitment. The people of South Tyrol has not lived in vain for 20 years under the beds and I know that there will be no more after the completion of resettlement in the countryside on Isarco and Adige German life. "
place of recording
Innsbruck
???iuimd_video_v_zeit_zuordnung_en???:
1945
transcription:
Yes, many people left but mainly the ones who didn't have anything. The more prosperous ones stayed even though they had opted for Germany. But the poor and the stable hands and the maids went to the train station on wagons with all their belongings. They left. And for example ? I can tell you what my two neighbours experienced. One is South Tyrolean and the other is from ? what's that called in Romania? The German region in Romania? That's where the Saxon-Germans or something are from. What they had to go through, much more than I. Much more - - - It would take too long to tell you. But, as a short example, this neighbour, she was South Tyrolean, had a pathetic little farm on the mountain. They emigrated and got a farm in Czechoslovakia. The farmer who's farm it was, had to leave and his son worked as a stable hand for them. And she had eight children, eight children; she was hard-working and liked to be outdoors. After the war, when the Russians came, they fled. The Czechs sided with the Russians. So the farmer came back and they were driven out. She walked to Innsbruck on foot, with eight children. From Czechoslovakia to Innsbruck! During that march she had her ninth child in a barn. A few days later the one-year-old child died. ? Every time I think of that I almost have to cry. She buried it at the roadside; then they walked on. ? They had a pram. A Czech woman threw the baby out of it. "Germans don't need prams." She took the pram and left. Then her oldest daughter carried the baby. She was ten or twelve years old and carried the little one. They walked to Innsbruck on foot. They got here via Vienna. ? That kind of thing happened too. ?