The rise and fall of a family business.

It all started with the Soviet troops entering the town in tanks and trucks loaded with troops. And the German troops withdrawing , chaos ensued. They Czechs quickly assembled the government and with help and assistance of the Soviets reclaimed control of Sudutenland and put it back into Czechoslovakia. And then the Czechs took their revenge on the ethnic Germans who stayed behind, taking possession of their houses, evicting the German occupants, deporting them back to war torn Germany, with 40 kilos of personal possessions. They also beat them, and humiliated them during this chaotic deportation. History records this as the “Wild deportations”. The family we have been following was one such family.

Aurorities of the newly formed Czechoslovakian government came to their house and put up an eviction notice early in the morning. The instructions stated they were to vacate the premises, within two days, leaving everything in place except for 40 kilos of personal belongings. Nothing was to be damaged or destroyed by them on pain of imprisonment. Police were on site on the morning of the second day to escort them out of the house and out of town. Nothing of business value was allowed to be taken. If they were too slow the people who gathered out side the house to watch would shout at them and throw stones or hit them with switches. In this way the family was run out of town and then out of the country And into Germany. The father was still away, being held as a prisoner of war, and the wife was head of the house and the glass hut. The two boys were with her and the young daughter. Everyone was crying. The neighbors were going through the same ordeal. A long straggling caravan of deported Germans were walking, carrying suitcases, pushing wheelbarrows. They were surrounded by jeering, laughing Slovaks and Czech residents of Gablonz, some of them glass workers employed by the German owners of the glass huts in town. Eventually they reached the German border, and they were searched for valuables that were taken from them by the Soviet border guards and pushed over the borderNow all the glass factory owners and their family members started on the long journey to Bavaria, where a town was being created by glass makers from Gablonz so that they could start up production of glass beads and buttons. By the time they arrived in the new town, which was being called NeuGablonz - new Gablonz, where authorities issued a house for every family to live in, the father arrived from Poland, where he had been imprisoned in a POW camp. He took charge of the family, and gathered all the molds and sample beads and buttons and equipment that the boys had concealed and smuggled out of Czechoslovaki. Also, he petitioned for an abandoned bunker that was not bombed out during the war, which was repurposed as a glass hut and residence. Their lives were being rebuilt.