ENGLISH

 

DEPARTURE OF THE CZECHOSLOVAK

RESIDENTS

“The Last Train” exhibition
 

The Krnov region has seen Slavic settlement since the early Middle Ages — the oldest

written records, from the mid-13th century, refer to the town by its Slavic name,

Kyrnow. From the 13th century onward, however, German settlers arrived as part of

the great medieval German colonization (the so-called Ostsiedlung), and Krnov

gradually became a predominantly German-speaking town. Nevertheless, it remained

politically and legally bound to the Czech state — from 1377 it was the seat of the

independent Duchy of Krnov, and in 1411 it passed permanently into the hands of the

Czech king Wenceslaus IV. The Czech presence in Krnov thus has roots far older than

one might expect in a town with such a pronouncedly German character.

Between 1918 and 1938, a minority of Czechoslovaks also lived in Krnov, a town with a

strong German majority. According to the 1930 census, the town had 23,464

inhabitants, of whom 1,876 declared Czechoslovak nationality — just under 8%. The

overwhelming majority, more than 21,400 people (91%), were German. The share of

Czechoslovaks grew noticeably during the First Republic — while in 1921 only 5.4% of

the town's population identified as Czechoslovak, by 1930 that share had nearly

doubled. This growth was driven by a deliberate state policy of strengthening the

Czechoslovak presence in the borderlands through official, teaching, and other state

positions — at the post office, on the railways, in the courts, tax offices, and schools.

The Czechoslovaks of Krnov were represented above all by minority associations. A

key role was played by the Matice opavská, a Silesia-wide organization dedicated to

Czech culture and minority education, which at the height of its activity in 1937

brought together more than seven thousand members in 85 local branches across

Silesia. Social and sporting life was organized by the Krnov branch of the Sokol

association — among its leading figures were Jan Hradil, head of the Krnov post office,

and František Čížek, director of the Krnov municipal school, who in 1934 also helped

found a sister branch in nearby Bruntál.

A symbol of the Krnov Czechoslovaks' confidence in their own future in the town was

the new building of the Czech municipal school and grammar school, constructed from

April 1937 to September 1938. Teachers looked forward to opening the new school

year in the modern building. Fate, however, decided otherwise — on 7 October 1938,

instead of the first school bell, they left, together with the rest of Krnov's

Czechoslovaks, from the now-occupied borderland. The new school thus never served

the purpose for which it had been built.

The turning point came in the autumn of 1938. After the Munich Agreement and the

occupation of the borderlands by the German army, Krnov's Czechoslovaks found

themselves reduced to a national minority with no rights whatsoever.
Theirassociations were dissolved and their property confiscated — the Matice opavská had

to move its headquarters to Slezská Ostrava, and a year later it was forcibly merged,

along with other organizations, into the Národní matice (National Matice) in Prague.

The Czech language was banned in official dealings and in public life, and

Czechoslovaks were forbidden from holding any office in state administration or at the

municipal level.

With the loss of Czechoslovak sovereignty over the territory, Krnov's Czechoslovaks

immediately lost their jobs, and the vast majority left for the interior of the country

either before the arrival of the German army or immediately afterward — most often

to Opava, Ostrava, Olomouc, or other Moravian towns, where they had to start new

lives. A smaller number were directly expelled by the German administration. The

departure affected entire families, who often had to leave home with a minimum of

possessions and no certainty of return.

After the end of the Second World War and the expulsion of the German population,

many of those who had left Krnov in 1938 returned and took part in the postwar

resettlement and reconstruction of the town. The new wave of settlement, however,

was no longer purely Czech — alongside returnees, new settlers arrived in Krnov from

Slovakia, together with Greeks fleeing the civil war and other migrants from the

interior. Krnov, for centuries a German town with deep Czech roots, thus became, after

1945, a more nationally diverse place than it had ever been in its modern history.

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DEPORTATION OF THE JEWISH RESIDENTS

“The Last Train” exhibition
 

Between 1918 and 1938, the Jewish residents of Krnov formed only a tiny minority

(roughly 1% of the town's population), yet their significance far exceeded their small

numbers. Their ranks produced many lawyers, physicians, public and private officials,

and teachers, including at the Krnov secondary school (reálka). They were also

represented in the management of major local enterprises and firms. Their standing is

illustrated by a 1932 figure: of the 11 attorneys in the town, seven were Jewish, and of

the nine specialist physicians, five were Jewish. The community's economic prosperity

allowed for the establishment of foundations and significant associational activity. Its

official representative body was the Jewish Religious Community, which oversaw

religious life, kept the registers, represented the community in official matters, and

organized lectures. It was headed by Rabbi Dr. David Rudolfer (fig. 2). The most

important associations included the burial brotherhood Chevra Kadisha, the local

branch of the Zionist organization Zion, and a women's Israelite association.

The beginnings of the destruction of Krnov's Jewish community can be dated to the

second half of the 1930s, when anti-Jewish sentiment in the borderlands intensified in

direct connection with Nazi Germany's pressure to annex the border regions to the

Reich. The year 1938 proved to be the turning point — the Anschluss of Austria, the

May mobilization, Hitler's speech of 12 September, the Munich Agreement, and the

entry of German troops into Krnov on 6 October. These events led to a massive

departure of Jews and the effective disintegration of the community, which split into

three groups.

The first group consisted of those who emigrated abroad, chiefly to Great Britain,

Palestine, the USA, Sweden, South America, or the newly established Slovak Republic.

Many left as early as 1938, while others managed to do so over the following two

years. Families were often forcibly separated. Krnov's Jews abroad took part in the

struggle to restore Czechoslovakia — in the ranks of the Western armies, for example,

were Arnošt Freiberger and Hanuš Petr Eibuschitz as RAF airmen, Hugo Langschur as a

military technician, Adalbert Löwin as a reconnaissance-vehicle commander, Ludvík

Pollak as a radio mechanic, and Otto Reik as an artilleryman.

The second group comprised Jews who, after the occupation of the borderlands,

moved to the interior of the country, most often to Prague, Brno, or Ostrava. After the

proclamation of the Protectorate, however, they too found themselves trapped.

Attempts to emigrate mostly failed because of visa restrictions and set immigration

quotas. Some families managed to save at least their children — five Jewish children

from Krnov were rescued through Sir Nicholas Winton's rescue transports (Jan Bäuml,

Hanuš Petr and Štěpán Pavel Eibuschitz, Kurt Pavel and Doris Lilli Eisler). Those who

remained in the Protectorate were subsequently subjected to anti-Jewish restrictions

and decrees, then deported from various places to Terezín and from there
on topredetermined destination stations, where they were murdered as part of the so-called

Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

The third group consisted of a small number of Jews who remained in Krnov. They

faced the Aryanization of their property, the liquidation of the Jewish Religious

Community and the Chevra Kadisha association, and intense antisemitic propaganda.

The persecution culminated in the deportations from the Opava government district in

1942 to Terezín and the extermination camps. So-called “Jewish Mischlinge” (persons

of mixed Jewish descent) living in Krnov and its surroundings were likewise placed

under close scrutiny by the Nazi administration.

During the Shoah, roughly half of the interwar number of Krnov's Jews are believed to

have perished, in a variety of places: in Terezín, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Łódź ghetto,

the camps of Operation Reinhard, Maly Trostinets, Baranavichy, concentration camps

in what is now Germany and Austria, or in the massacres at Rumbula, Kremnička, and

Kalevi-Liiva, among others.

Only a fraction of the survivors returned to Krnov after the war. The attempt to revive

the Jewish Religious Community, whose prewar membership was supplemented by

individuals of Jewish origin who had come to Krnov from Subcarpathian Ruthenia,

Poland, or even Lithuania, can be described as unsuccessful. Some of those who had

fought in the Second World War returned to Krnov once it ended, but became

disillusioned by the course of events at the time. Further developments were

negatively affected by postwar persecution and by emigration after 1948. The

property of Krnov's Jews, previously Aryanized, was subsequently nationalized and,

with few exceptions, was never returned to its original owners or their descendants.

The demise of the traditional Jewish community in Krnov was completed during the

1950s, when the Jewish Religious Community was reduced to a mere synagogue

congregation and subsequently came under the administration of the Jewish

Community of Ostrava.

The memory of the once-significant community has thus been preserved primarily in

archival sources, the testimonies of eyewitnesses, and traces (particularly

architectural ones) within the town, as well as through the descendants of Krnov's

Jews, who today live all over the world — in England, Israel, the USA, Mexico, Australia,

New Zealand, France, Germany, China, Canada, Chile, and Austria.

 

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EXPULSION OF THE GERMAN RESIDENTS

“The Last Train” exhibition
 

In May 1945, the most brutal and largest military conflict in human history to that

point — the Second World War — came to an end. The unprecedented atrocities

committed by the Nazis against innocent people did not go unanswered. The war had

broken through the limits of humanity, and the accumulated anger and frustration of

the long war years, together with the continuous German occupation of 1938–1945,

resulted in a postwar reckoning.

The Allied powers agreed on population transfers in order to minimize the ethnic

tensions that had been one of the causes of the armed conflicts of the 20th century. In

1945–46, almost 2.2 million Czechoslovak Germans/Austrians were expelled, of whom

1.4 million went to the western occupation zones of Germany and 0.8 million to the

Soviet occupation zone of Germany. Tens of thousands of people, mainly from

southern Moravia and southern Bohemia, were also expelled or fled to Austria.

In addition to the government-organized “transfer” (odsun), there were also excesses

in the form of the so-called “wild transfer” (divoký odsun), during which decentralized

purges and expulsions of the German-speaking civilian population took place. The

same fate befell our German-speaking fellow citizens of Krnov. Some of them were

expelled during the “wild transfer” phase in June 1945 (a march of roughly 3,000

Krnov residents, under harrowing conditions, from Krnov across the Jeseníky mountain

massif to a camp in Králíky); German eyewitnesses estimate around 300 victims of this

wild expulsion. Most Krnov Germans were relocated to three main Krnov camps (below

Cvilín, on the site of a former prisoner-of-war camp; on Opavská Street, on the site of

former Wehrmacht barracks; and in the Hlubčice suburb). Krnov's Germans had to

leave their property behind, hand over their real estate, and enter the camps with only

a minimum of hand luggage. There they were subjected to violent treatment by the

guards — Krnov's civil registers record dozens of “deaths without cause” among the

interned German fellow citizens.

The confiscated property of German families was partly allocated, under official

supervision, to new Czech owners, and partly looted without control and sold on

further into the interior. From the camps in Krnov, our German fellow citizens were

deported by train to the occupation zones in Germany, mostly to the Bavaria and

Baden-Württemberg regions, but also to the Soviet occupation zone. In Krnov itself,

only a few dozen German-speaking residents remained — either partners in mixed

Czech-German marriages, antifascists, German-speaking Jews, or technical specialists

needed for industry. Convicted war criminals and Nazis also remained in

Czechoslovakia — though one should not entertain great illusions about the fairness of

the courts of that time: witnesses who might have testified to the positive conduct of

some of the accused were pressured to remain silent, so as not to expose themselves

to the risk of punishment. Only demonstrable German antifascists were allowed totake
a larger share of their property with them on the transports to Germany, if they

had not chosen to remain in Czechoslovakia instead.

The scale of the postwar retribution provoked disagreement even among humanely

minded segments of the population. A testimony has survived in Krnov from Jewish

native Vojta Levin (Adalbert Löwin), who left the Krnov church in disgust during the

midnight Christmas service in 1945, after the German participants in the service were

told to leave. The excesses were criticized even by former prisoners of concentration

camps and German jails, who found violence against innocent civilians abhorrent,

even though they themselves had suffered unjustly in German camps.

The human, demographic, economic, and spiritual void caused by the murder of the

Jewish population, the wartime destruction of the Czech elites, and the postwar

expulsion of German fellow citizens can never be fully healed.

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REPATRIATION OF THE GREEK RESIDENTS

“The Last Train” exhibition
 

The arrival of the Greek population in Krnov is connected with the Greek Civil War,

which took place between 1946 and 1949 and whose deeper roots reach back to the

period of the Second World War. For Greece, that war began on 28 October 1940,

when Italy, under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, invaded Greek territory from

Albania. The Greek government (Gen. Metaxas, fig. 1) rejected the Italian ultimatum at

the time with the answer “OCHI” (NO), and this day became a Greek national holiday.

The Greek armed forces succeeded not only in halting the Italian army but in pushing

it deep into the Albanian interior. This defeat of fascist Italy is regarded as one of the

first victories over fascism in Europe.

A decisive turning point came on 6 April 1941, when Greece was invaded by the

German army through Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The country was unable to withstand

an attack on multiple fronts and was defeated. It was subsequently divided into three

occupation zones administered by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria. The occupation period

brought a sharp decline in the population's standard of living, the economic plundering

of the country, famine, and harsh suppression of any expressions of resistance. These

conditions gave rise to a strong resistance movement, whose symbolic beginning was

the act of two Greek students who, on 30 May 1941, tore down the Nazi flag from the

Acropolis in Athens.

After the departure of the occupying forces in October 1944, the political situation in

Greece grew even more tense. An important role was played by the National

Liberation Front (EAM) and its military wing, ELAS. Great Britain sought to limit

communist influence and keep Greece within the Western sphere of influence, as had

been agreed at the Yalta Conference. (Greek partisans, fig. 2) The 1946 elections,

which the left-wing parties did not take part in, brought the monarchist right to power,

which launched a systematic persecution of the left-leaning population. In response,

the Democratic Army of Greece (DSE) was formed, but it was defeated in 1949.

Immediately afterward, large-scale emigration of the population to neighboring

countries and to the states of the Eastern Bloc followed. Greek refugees had already

begun arriving in Czechoslovakia from 1948. The first wave of migration consisted

mainly of children, who were evacuated from the war zones in order to save their lives.

They were placed in children's homes and reception facilities, where they were

provided with food, clothing, medical care, and education. At the same time,

instruction in the Greek language, history, and traditions was provided, so as to

preserve their awareness of their national identity. Further waves of migration

consisted of adult refugees arriving mainly via Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria. They

were gradually integrated into the labor process, particularly in industry, agriculture,

and construction. At the end of 1950, more than 12,000 people of Greek origin were

living in Czechoslovakia, a considerable proportion of whom were settled in the
borderregions of Northern Moravia and Bohemia. In the following years, families were also

reunited, among other things with the help of the International Red Cross. (Greek

children in Czechoslovakia, fig. 3)

Krnov and its surroundings became one of the most important centers of Greek

settlement. From 1949 onward, a numerous and cohesive community grew up here,

one that significantly influenced the social and cultural life of the town and the wider

region. For many years, Greek could commonly be heard in the streets, shops, and

restaurants; women often wore traditional dark clothing, and the community

maintained its own customs, social gatherings, and cultural festivities. Greeks would

gather in parks, in restaurants, and in the Silesian House (Slezský dům), which became

one of the centers of community life. After 1974, when an amnesty was declared in

Greece, most of Krnov's Greeks returned to their homeland. Nevertheless, the Greek

trace in Krnov remains to this day and forms a significant part of its modern and

cultural history.