A Boy from Moravská Ostrava Who Spoke Czech

A child who grew up bilingual yet was declared an enemy. Dr. Ottfried Pustejovsky spoke of flight, violence, hope and the inner strength to forgive.

The boy spoke Czech, believed in goodness and was still beaten, humiliated, and expelled. On July 5, 2025, Dr. Ottfried Pustejovsky shared his story. A story of fear and reconciliation.

“What followed was not peace, but a long process of mourning. From one minute to the next, fellow citizens became German swine.”

Dr. Pustejovsky

Dr. Ottfried Pustejovsky, born in 1934, spoke these words at Heiligenhof. The room was silent, no outrage, no applause, just a palpable, heavy quiet. Because his testimony needs no drama, it is the drama itself.

He was born in Moravská Ostrava, raised bilingually, and as a child witnessed the final days of the war and the first days afterward. A world in which everything shifted. Enemy became friend, friend became enemy. His family spoke both German and Czech, but it didn’t help. On January 17, 1945, still under German control, the order came:

“Pack immediately, women and children must flee.”

Dr. Pustejovsky

The train that was supposed to take them west kept stopping. It was minus 20 degrees (–4 °F). Ten year old Pustejovsky saw with his own eyes how frozen, dead infants were carried out of the train. His mother had sewn coats from old furs for him and his sister, that saved their lives.

He recounts calmly, almost factually. But the images he evokes speak for themselves. The fear that his little sister’s cries for their mother would trigger a rape by Soviet soldiers.

“Davaj časy” — “give me the watch” the moment when, at age eleven, he quietly slid a watch, a gift from his father, into his trousers to hide it from soviet looters.

“I didn’t tell anyone for a week that I still had it.”

Dr. Pustejovsky

What followed was a back and forth of fleeing and returning. The hope that, as a bilingual family, they would be spared. But then came forced labor, violence, the order for deportation, and the attempt to go into hiding. Ottfried became “Otík,” Elsbeth became “Eliška.” The “N” the letter marking “Němec” (German) was torn off.

“I was looking through the basement window. When I came back, I was six meters away, completely deaf and stayed that way for a week.”

Dr. Pustejovsky

They hid with a distant relative. Czech neighbors helped them. His mother a woman who survived beatings and threats, carried rubble, and taught her children:

“You must not hate.”

Maria Pustejovsky

In Fulnek, Ottfried attended a Czech school and received better grades in Czech than the Czech children.

He survived everything, the transports, the hunger, the cold, the mistrust in Bavaria, and even the ignorance of a mayor who said the boy should become a bricklayer, not attend grammar school.

But Ottfried made it to graduation, to university, and to civil service, then came his own research. Dr. Pustejovsky wrote books about Jáchymov, Ústí, the expulsions, and uranium mining. Not with hate, but with understanding and a desire to name things truthfully, without stripping others of their dignity.

His lecture was not an accusation, not a nationalist revival, but a quiet, clear appeal. Look, listen, do not judge too quickly. Dr. Pustejovsky spoke about perpetrators, but also about helpers, about guilt, but also about fate.

He spoke about archives, about the destruction of records, about a man named Pokorný, who first worked for the Gestapo, then for the Czechoslovak secret police and who organized the Brno death march.

But at the heart of it all remained the small boy from Moravská Ostrava, who spoke Czech and was still told he was “just a German swine.” Today, at over 90 years old, that boy speaks to us, not only in German, but also in Czech. He does not speak to take revenge, but to remember and to reconcile.

Deutsch https://www.henryertner.com/ein-junge-aus-maehrisch-ostrau-der-tschechisch-sprach/

English https://medium.com/@henryertner/a-boy-from-moravsk%C3%A1-ostrava-who-spoke-czech-2e7930add6db

Česky https://medium.seznam.cz/clanek/henry-ertner-chlapec-z-moravske-ostravy-ktery-mluvil-cesky-166536