John Stieber - Against the Odds - Survival on the Russian Front 1944-1945 [2nd Edition]

Since we were surrounded by open countryside, there was unlimited space for rambling across the fields or flying a kite, but I also loved to play in our garden and look after my pet rabbits. When I became the proud owner of a tricycle, there was almost no limit to the distance I could travel on the traffic-free roads accompanied by Erika on her two-wheeled “Fairy” bicycle.

My earliest contacts with other children came mainly through friends of my parents or those they knew on a social basis in the Wellington/Shrewsbury area, but I did not meet them often enough at the various children’s parties to enable me to form any close friendships. I had a lot more contact with grown-ups during the years in England than would have been usual for a child of my age and I must have benefitted from a greater mental maturity as a result of this.

My parents settled down very quickly in England and loved the English way of life. I think that my mother was much happier than she had been in Czechoslovakia, where she always felt more of a foreigner. My father also seemed to prefer the more relaxed atmosphere and a greater sense of freedom than he had previously experienced. Then again, working conditions in the sugar factory were definitely better than the twelve-hour shifts he had had to work during the beet-processing season in Czechoslovakia.

When I was five years old, I began to attend a kindergarten in Wellington which meant taking the train from our local railway-station in Admaston. Erika, on her “Fairy” bicycle, and I on my tricycle had to cycle the three-quarters of a mile to the station and after reaching Wellington we had to walk another half a mile to the school. Covering these distances was quite an undertaking, but I did not consider it a hardship; in fact I actually looked forward to each day as if I were setting out on a new adventure.

My parents’ happiness in Alscott, and in England generally, was a confirmation of my own acceptance of the English lifestyle and we were all very sad when the time came for us to leave in the spring of 1932. By this time, the sugar factory was operating well and my father was recalled to the head office of his firm in Brünn.

Since my father did not expect to remain in Brünn for very long, our family moved into the house of my grandmother on my mother’s side, who was a widow. There was plenty of room for us in her suburban villa which backed onto a fine wooded area overlooking the river Moldau. The only other occupant of the house was my mother’s unmarried sister. Aunt Hella was a domestic science teacher and a woman of diverse accomplishments. In later years Erika and I were to form a very close relationship with her when she was married and we spent many happy school-holidays in her house.

In Brünn I was faced with adapting to a new, and very different, culture. People struck me as generally being more serious and formal and I missed the relaxed atmosphere to which I had been accustomed in England. My grandmother’s house was a bit like an oasis in an alien land. She herself was a typical Viennese lady, very stout, a wonderful cook and full of good humour, so there was always fun and laughter in the house.

Our garden was quite large and very sheltered. I remember the lovely smell of peaches ripening in summer, the pungent aroma of box-hedges and the scent of the many roses that my grandmother lovingly cared for. Unfortunately, Erika and I were not allowed to play in the woodlands behind the house, so we went there only when accompanied by our parents. This usually meant going on somewhat formal walks and I sorely missed the unrestricted freedom to roam that I had enjoyed in Alscott.

I do not remember ever meeting my grandfather on my mother’s side, since he died while I was a small child. Erika remembers him as being a very upright person and a man of great integrity, but she felt intimidated by him. My father’s widowed mother also lived in Brünn. She had an apartment near the centre of the city and we regularly went to visit her. She was tall and thin and very serious. As a young woman she had been an accomplished violinist and, according to photographs, must have been extremely attractive. Although my grandfather on my father’s side died when I was very young, I did meet him once when we went over to Brünn on a holiday from England. I remember him as being very tall with a long white beard. He often took me to a playground in a public park, the Spielberg, where I loved having a swing and getting a push from him.

In Brünn I went to a boy’s school, known as a Gymnasium, and this took some getting used to. The boys in my class were truly a hard bunch and our teacher, Herr Zelinka, a huge terrifying man with a black beard, ruled the class with an iron fist. Although this was a German-speaking school, most of the boys were Czech in appearance and by nature and most of them also had Czech names. My father’s Czech colleagues in England did not have any children, so this was my first contact with Czech children and I did not find it easy. It was not that I actually had any trouble from any of them but, with my English upbringing, I was so different from them that I found myself attending classes without achieving a personal relationship with the other boys.

My sister fared similarly in her girls’ class in the Lyceum. One day she brought a box of sweets into class, which she shared with the other girls. When all the sweets had been eaten, the girls told her how stupid she was to have given them away when she could have eaten them all herself. How different this was from what we had experienced in England!

I remember going reluctantly on several outings to the countryside with my class. The boys’ mothers invariably came along too, weighed down with huge rucksacks filled with food. It seemed that the purpose of these outings was to sit down and consume mountains of food, each mother setting herself up as a conveyor-belt between the rucksack and her offspring. There was no question of any games being played and when the rucksacks were finally empty, everybody went home.

Coping with these aspects of my new environment was not the only problem I was up against. I also had to learn to speak Czech, an immensely difficult language to learn and pronounce. Being already fluent in English and German, I managed to make reasonable progress, but it was not easy.

We stayed in Czechoslovakia for less than a year and I was not yet seven when we left. All in all, living there had been tough for me. At the same time my perception of people and the differences between nationalities had been further sharpened. I had also learned that excitable people have a tendency to say unreasonable things and to act in an uncontrolled manner and that people of one nationality grow up uncritical of their way of life if they have no means of comparing it with another. Though I was still only a child, I had already developed an ability to discriminate between people and between different ways of life.

When news came that my father’s next posting was to be in Ireland, I felt quite glad, even though this meant yet another change. Although I had learned to cope with all that was foreign to me in Brünn, I never felt fully at home there and doubt if I would have become much happier over a longer period of time.

These brief notes on our family history in Brünn have a very sad ending. My father’s mother died there before the end of the war and was lucky to be spared the terrible aftermath. However, my other grandmother was less fortunate and was evicted from her home at eighty-five years of age and told to pack a single bag and leave. Despite her advanced age, she took a neighbour’s two orphaned children under her wing and set off on the road. The ordeal finally became too much for her and she died in a small town not far from Vienna, her place of birth.