Usti nad Labem, North Bohemia, Aug 4 (CTK) – Experts from the Usti municipal museum yesterday started to unpack a number of parcels that remained hidden in a nearby village for 70 years and that contain personal effects of the inhabitants of what was the Sudetenland area with prevailing German population before WWII.
A total of 113 parcels were recently found in a cache under the roof of a villa in the Libouchec village, where a German family hid them before being deported from Czechoslovakia within the post-war transfer of ethnic Germans and Hungarians.
The find is rare by its size, and it offers the experts a unique chance to document the situation where the local people hid their personal effects in a time pressure, without knowing whether they would return to their house one day, museum director Vaclav Houfek told journalists.
After unwrapping the parcels, the experts uncovered umbrellas, hats, buttons, a painting, a bulb, badges, ski, a box with fascist military propaganda items and other things.
Houfek said hundreds of Sudeten German families might have hidden their effects this way before the transfer, but no complete treasure like the one from Libouchec has been found so far.
The circumstances of the uncovering of the find in the villa, which hosts a kindergarten now, are unusual as well.
Last week, the cache was reported to the local authority by Rudi Schlattner, a German native of Usti, who came to uncover it after 70 years.
Schlattner is to return to Usti in the days to come to help identify the uncovered items and highlight their context and circumstances.
The museum would like to put at least a part of the find on display in September. The planned exhibition is to focus on the events in the Usti area in 1945.
The state is yet to decide which institution will manage the Sudeten “treasure.”
“Our museum wants the series of items to remain undivided and a part of our collections, if possible,” Houfek said.
As confiscates, the items probably belong to the state.
