“Displacement had a 'large negative impact full of uncertainties on her childhood and youth.' (...) Only later I had a cry...”
Marianna Tomašovská, nee 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. Therefore the little Marianna was growing up as a village orphan in Teplice nad Metují. Her father married again in 1957 and that was why Marianna could come back to her family. They newly settled in Broumov.
Although she mastered the Czech language quickly and achieved very good results at school, she couldn't study at Grammar School. Eventually she got to Brno where she graduated from the Secondary School of Nursing specialized in optics. After a couple of years working in Kladno and some other places she returned to Broumov at the beginning of the 80s. She lives there till the present day. After her temporary job at the railway where she worked as a points woman she got a job at an optician's in Broumov. She has been working there part time till today. She got divorced twice and she has got two children.
Even if Mrs Tomašovská was born after the war, she spoke only German till her six years of age. 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 over her family tree, whose oldest records reach back to 1750.
