Wilma Iggers speaks to students at Graf-Stauffenberg Gymnasium in Osnabrück (2005).
This video is currently only available in German. Below you will find an English translation of the audio track.
“My experiences were very different.
I was born and raised in Chechoslovakia and it was the only - by far - democratic country in Europe.
I lived in a small town with three thousand inhabitants, most of whom were German-speaking. But there were also Czechs, that is, mainly civil servants, who had come here. There was actually no problem.
The problems between the nationalities did not start until the mid-1930s, in 1936-37 Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Nazis, came to our city and […]. Because of the threat because Austria had been occupied, ours said in early ‘38 that we could be next. We actually didn’t believe it and we thought we have our allies and they won’t let us down - but totally have them. And with the Munich Agreement, the part of Bohemia and Moravia in which I lived - that is, the mountainous outskirts in the part where we lived and which bordered Germany and Bavaria - was separated from Czechoslovakia and joined to Germany.
We left the country in October 1938 and the rest of Czechoslovakia then perished. In March 1939, Bohemia and Moravia became a German protectorate and the Slovak part became an independent state - in quotes.”