English Translation

48a 8 The protocol recorded with Mrs. Marie Langer from Zawada (Hultschiner Ländchen) is also shocking. Her suffering was the suffering of hundreds of other people who endured with her similar lot. On April 2nd, l937, the gendarmerie appeared in her home, who arrested her husband without further explanation. All late attempts by the woman to visit her husband in the Ostrava County Prison were rejected. On May 2nd, on behalf of the gendarmerie, the parish servant was sent to her, who informed her that she should immediately go to her husband. With her brother-in-law and some siblings she set out on her way. I now read from her record: "Now we have come to the courthouse. My brothers and sisters led me through a long passage to a shed. There was my poor man in a box, which was nailed together from four boards. As I saw him, I fell down and shouted: I just want to know what you did to my husband, that he had black and blue spots on his head! Then I was told that he cut his veins. My repeated requests to show me the cuts were rejected with coarse words. My husband's clothes were all wet, as if he had been lying in the water. I saw that his legs were completely dark-blue; I can summon them before God. In the district I asked the Inspcktor when my last supper was eaten. He told me at 6 o'clock. But as the inspector and the prison guards confirmed to me, my husband was already dead at 6 a.m. I can say that my husband was martyred or killed to death; he was so attached to life, to me and to the children that he had never taken his life." The order of investigators and detainees did not appear to be any exception in the Sudeten-German history of suffering. Names such as Peter Donnhäuser, J. Lampa, Josef Kossek, Anton Stabner, Karl Polzer, Wilhelm Zavaczki and Wilhelm Hering, who were murdered or tortured to death by the Czechs, denounced with relentless rigour ! 276