“Displacement had a 'large negative impact full of uncertainties on her childhood and youth.' (...) Only later did I cry...”
Marianna Tomašovská, born Marianna Rathnerová, was born in the village Bučnice in North-East Bohemia in the region of Adršpach-Teplice Rocks on March 14th, 1947. Both her parents had German citizenship. In the difficult post-war period, her father lost his hand shortly after the birth of his daughter. Her mother died in December 1949. Except for her father and his brother, Augustin, all her relatives lived in Germany. Her father, as a disabled person without Czech citizenship and therefore without any social support, was not able to look after his daughter for a couple of years. Thus, the little Marianna grew up as a village orphan in Teplice nad Metují. Her father married again in 1957 and that enabled Marianna to come back to her family. They moved to Broumov.
Although she mastered the Czech language quickly and had excellent grades at school, she couldn't study at Grammar School. Eventually she got to Brno where she graduated from the Secondary School of Nursing with a specialization in optics. After a couple of years working in Kladno and various other places, she returned to Broumov at the beginning of the 80s. She has lived there till the present day. After a temporary job at the railway, where she worked as a points woman, she got a job at an optician's office in Broumov. She has been working there part time ever since. She has been divorced twice and has two children.
Even though Mrs Tomašovská was born after the war, she spoke only German until she was six years old. Her childhood was influenced by the fate of the German population so much that she can be rightly considered a child of the old Sudetes. As she herself says, the displacement had a "large negative impact full of uncertainties on [her] childhood and youth." The interview with Mrs Tomašovská took place in the room with her family tree, whose oldest records reach back to 1750.
