Over 70 years after ethnic Germans were forced to leave Czechoslovakia following the second world war, we meet those attempting a reconciliation

The ghosts of the past surged through Erika Rahnsch’s mind as she settled down for the night in the home of her ancestors.

“I could feel a shiver going up my spine,” said the 87-year-old, recalling the sensation of trying to sleep in what had been her childhood bedroom before war and nationalist-fuelled revenge drove her family from the land they had lived in for centuries.

They were among more than 3 million German speakers expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945 following Germany’s defeat in the second world war, in an officially ordered act of ethnic cleansing supposedly justified by Hitler’s aggression and permitted by war-time allies Britain, the US and the Soviet Union.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Erika Rahnsch. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

Only in 2006 did Rahnsch finally return to the house of her upbringing in what had been the village of Falkenau-Kittlitz – now Kytlice – after its current Czech owner, Petr Kubat, heard her story and invited her to stay as a guest.

They became firm friends, with Rahnsch visiting every year and Kubat, 48, who runs a dental equipment business, reciprocating with trips to her home in Waldkraiburg, Bavaria, a town established to accommodate postwar refugees. By mutual agreement, both refer to the Kytlice home as “our house”.

Their relationship has been showcased as a model of reconciliation by campaigners in the present-day Czech Republic promoting dialogue on a dark chapter in the country’s past – the mass deportation and mistreatment of most of the country’s ethnic Germans on the grounds, frequently unfounded, that they supported the Nazis, who occupied the country from 1939 until the end of the second world war.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Germans who were expelled from Czechoslovakia and their descendants go on a tour of Prague that shows them important sights of the city relating to the mass expulsion. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

Rahnsch and Kubat were among those present at a groundbreaking gathering this week in Prague of about 90 German expellees and their relatives and dozens of Czechs, including some whose families took over houses vacated by German speakers.

Organised by the Prague-based Anti-Komplex group, it aimed to make onetime German deportees feel welcome in the land of their birth – in the absence of an official apology – while encouraging Czechs to confront what some say is a hidden historical trauma older generations are reluctant to discuss.

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The event included discussion panels – featuring often-harrowing testimony from deportees – and a “concert of reconciliation” in Prague’s St Antonius church, followed by a Catholic mass conducted in both languages in the same venue, once a site of humiliation for the city’s German speakers.

While most of those exiled lived in the heavily German-speaking border region of Sudetenland, which had been ceded to Hitler in 1938 in a vain effort to avert war, Strossmayerovo Square in front of the church was a collecting point for deportations from Prague’s Halesovice district – then dubbed “Klein Berlin” (Little Berlin) because of its large ethnic German community.

A famous photo of the time shows a crowd of deportees – some with swastikas daubed on their clothing, suitcases or foreheads – gathered there awaiting forced transportation to internment centres or the German border.

They left in mass transports from the nearby Bubny railway station, the same location from which Czech Jews had been loaded on to trains bound for transfer to Nazi death camps.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Visit to Bubny railway station. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

About two dozen former deportees walked through the neighbourhood’s streets back to Bubny. It is still a functioning station but now has a striking Holocaust memorial known as the Gate of Infinity, which features a stretch of rail track symbolically pointing skyward.

Eva Honzejk, 85, whose family lived a few streets away, vividly recalled the brutal anti-German reprisals. “I remember seeing captured German soldiers being marched barefoot and the streets were partly covered in blood,” she said. “Later, we were herded into the Oko cinema nearby and there were dead bodies piled up in the courtyard. A boy I knew from school tried to defend one of the women and they shot him dead, although he was only 14.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eva Honzejk. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

“Everyone aged 14 to 40 was ordered to clean the streets and fill pot holes. As we worked, a Czech guard walked around with a whip calling us filthy Germans and saying he would make us pay for what he suffered in the concentration camp. When the Red Army came, the German girls had to walk around the streets half naked in their underwear, welcoming them.”

The German expulsions remain a sensitive issue in Czech society, sometimes used by local politicians to mobilise support.

Miloš Zeman, the Czech president, exploited it ruthlessly in his 2013 election campaign, accusing his opponent, Karel Schwarzenberg, a descendant of Austrian aristocrats, of “speaking like a Sudeten German” after he said the expulsion decrees, issued by the then Czechoslovakian president, Edvard Beneš, violated human rights law.

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Anti-Komplex said mayors in the former Sudetenland inundated the group with calls after those comments, expressing their fears that constituents would have to surrender their homes to the former owners – even though the Beneš decrees remain in force.

Their concerns reflected the Czech Republic’s failure to address its past, according to Tereza Vavrova, Anti-Komplex’s director.

She said: “For the Germans, it’s not about their houses, since they’ve been away for 70 years and don’t want to return, but the feeling of being accepted. Unfortunately, there is a huge trauma in Czech society. There is no sense that what happened after the war was a mistake or that we are to blame.

“People just accept the explanation that the German-speaking inhabitants betrayed us and supported Hitler and it’s actually not true. Later, there was a state-sponsored amnesia during the Communist era when nobody was allowed to talk about it.”

About 16,000 German speakers were killed during the expulsions, according to a joint Czech-German historical commission, with multiple reports of atrocities. Another 6,000 deaths were “unexplained” or listed as suicides. The death toll may have been far higher, although precise figures are disputed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prague weekend of reconciliation. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Guardian

An amnesty law exempting from prosecution anyone suspected of committing anti-German crimes between May and November 1945 remains in place.

Jan Čižinský, the Christian Democrat mayor of Prague’s former German neighbourhood, said repealing it could give reconciliation a major boost, even if most of the alleged offenders are probably dead.

“What’s important isn’t whether the perpetrators of the crimes are dead but that they were crimes – that should be recognised,” he said. “What is very tragic is that these violent solutions were supported by politicians. Our duty as politicians is not to support this tendency.”

For Rahnsch, however, reconciliation has already been achieved without political intervention. “Between myself and Petr Kubat, and between many other German and Czech people, it has already happened,” she said. “It can only happen from people to people contact, not through high politics.”