Ingeborg Neumejer's coming of age arrived with the crash of rifle butts on her family's apartment door. She was 14.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," she says. "It was such a horrible sound."

She rushed to comfort her screaming infant brother as Czech soldiers stormed into her home. It was the night of May 30, 1945 -- just days after the Red Army had marched into her hometown of Brno, south Moravia.

But while the city's Czech population was celebrating their liberation from the Third Reich, for Neumejer and the rest of Czechoslovakia's ethnic Germans, the worst was just beginning.

That night the family was forced from their home with only the clothes on their backs and led with 27,000 others on a grueling march to a camp in Pohorelice, en route to the Austrian border. There, Neumejer saw childhood friends raped by soldiers. Hundreds died of disease and malnutrition, including her grandparents. Her family was never allowed to return home.

They were not alone. Some 2.8 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945 and 1946 under what are known as the Benes decrees -- named for the postwar president Edvard Benes. Their property was confiscated without compensation.

Thousands died in concentration camps and in the massacres that ensued as the Czech population vented its rage following Hitler's brutal occupation, which many ethnic Germans had welcomed.

Survivors recall lynch mobs in the streets of Prague and other cities, where they say Germans were sometimes hanged from street lamps and burned alive.

"It was a shameful episode in what was a very terrible time in history -- and, unfortunately, one which it seems many would prefer to forget," says Konrad Badenheuer, press spokesman for the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft (SDL), an umbrella organization representing the more than 800,000 remaining "Sudeten Germans" -- so called because many lived in the Sudetenland, the region along Bohemia's border with Germany.

Now, with the Czech Republic eager to join the 15-member European Union, Sudeten Germans are faced with what could be their best, and last, chance to gain recognition and restitution.

The stakes are high for both sides, but the enduring gulf demonstrates just how far Central Europe still has to go in reconciling painful history with new-age desires for regional cooperation.


Renewed demands
Despite the violent ending, Neumejer fondly recalls her upbringing in "Brunn," as Brno was known to its German-speaking community.

The fading photos show a girl of 14, her raven hair cut just short of the shoulder. She laughs, playing a piano duet with her sister; smiles coyly for a portrait, already conscious of her adolescent beauty; and grimaces as she steers a bike down the precarious cobblestone streets of her hometown.

"It was a lovely childhood," says Neumejer, who now lives in Landsberg, Germany. "It was our home, and it was a wonderful one. We always hoped that someday we would be invited back."

These days, Neumejer is among many ethnic Germans who are seizing on the Czech Republic's EU aspirations to push for what they see as justice long overdue.

While Germany has earmarked billions of dollars for World War II victims and brought thousands of Nazi war criminals to justice, Sudeten Germans have yet to receive any compensation or formal apology from the Czech government.

No one involved in the atrocities of the immediate postwar period has ever been brought to trial, and the Benes decrees remain valid today under Czech law.

Those expelled want them abolished, and they have powerful allies.

At an annual meeting of Sudeten Germans in Augsburg, Germany, in May, Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel and Bavarian Prime Minister Edmund Stoiber called on the Czech Republic to annul the decrees as a condition for joining the EU. Other officials in Austria's ruling right-wing coalition, including ultranationalist Jorg Haider, have hammered the point home on many occasions since.

Whether the demand represents mere political posturing or poses a serious danger to the Czech Republic's EU entry is unclear.

New EU members must be ratified by all member states. While the German political mainstream for the most part strongly advocates expansion, Austrian officials have repeatedly threatened to block the Czech Republic's bid, citing the controversial Temelin nuclear plant near the Austrian border as well as the Benes decrees.

The European Parliament has twice asked the Czech Republic to address the Sudeten German issue, without making any explicit demands. Critics say the Benes decrees violate the Copenhagen criteria -- the EU's conditions for new members -- which forbid any legislation contributing to discrimination or human-rights abuses.

"This is something we will not compromise over," says Bernd Posselt, a member of the European Parliament and president of the SDL. "These are racist decrees, and it is impossible that they remain in the context of European law. We must erase these things forever."

Sudeten history 12th century: Bohemian nobility call on German peasants to develop the Sudetenland. 1620: Bohemia and Moravia fall to the Habsburg empire in the Battle of White Mountain. Three centuries of German domination ensue. 1918: Founding of the first Czechoslovak Republic after the Germans lose World War I. Czechs are relocated to predominantly German areas and the Army occupies the Sudetenland in a program of nationalization. 1938: Western powers cede the Sudetenland to Hitler under the Munich agreement. 1939: Hitler invades all of Czechoslovakia, establishing the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia." May 5, 1945: Czech uprising against Nazi occupation begins in Prague. Germans are imprisoned and riots ensue; about 200,000 perish. August 1945: The Potsdam Conference approves ethnic German expulsion. October 1945: Most of the Benes decrees regarding ethnic Germans are passed. All German property is confiscated. May 1946: Czechoslovak law forgives all crimes against Germans committed before October 25, 1945. End of 1946: Most ethnic Germans have been expelled or killed. Some 250,000 remain in the country, most as displaced persons.

But Ramiro Cibrian, head of the EU delegation in Prague, says he doesn't consider canceling the decrees a condition for expansion.

"It is my sense that there is no formal or clear linkage between the annulment of the Benes decrees and [EU] accession," he says. "Informally, however, the European Commission has always recommended dialogue and an improvement of discussion."

Czech officials meanwhile remain adamant, hesitant to engage in negotiations that could lead to a rash of property claims and demands for compensation.

"We will not budge on this issue. The Czech attitude toward the Sudeten Germans will never change," says Jan Sechter, a diplomatic aide at the Foreign Ministry's department of Central European affairs. "We would like to know the real aim of their efforts. We're concerned that it's actually some kind of property restitution or an attempt at restoring their status as a nation."


The unforgiven
Posselt admits that although the SDL's primary goal is to mend historical wounds and improve relations, the question of restitution must eventually be broached.

"We want to make it clear that this is still [Sudeten German] property," he says. "The expulsion was against the law. So this has to be discussed with the rightful owners."

In defending the decrees, Czech officials point to the Potsdam Conference of August 1945, which accepted the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia if it was carried out in an "orderly and humane" way. In 1995, the Czech constitutional court ruled that the Benes decrees were "legal and legitimate acts," denying any future claims to compensation.

Survivors, however, say no material reward could buy what they really desire -- a sense of justice.

"All I want is the historical truth," says Viktor Denk, whose father and grandfather both died in the camps when his family was expelled from Prague. As a boy of 14, he spent 11 months performing forced labor in Terezin, a north Bohemian concentration camp where Jews were held during the war and ethnic Germans were held after. Denk says thousands of his people died there under abominable conditions.

"I don't want money or anything like this," he says. "Just the truth -- that in Czechoslovakia, just like in Germany, they publish what really happened."

Germany has opened its records on the Holocaust and published exhaustive lists of victims. No such accounts exist of the Benes expulsions. While Germans embarked on an intense period of soul-searching over their role in World War II, the communist regime never encouraged dialogue on the expulsion, preferring to emphasize the glorious defeat of the Nazis by the Red Army.

A retired physics professor living in Kranzberg, Germany, the matter-of-fact Denk grows reflective when he speaks of the need for reconciliation.

"I only wish that Czechs would open themselves to the truth," he says gravely. "And others feel the same."

But even President Vaclav Havel, regarded by many in the West as the conscience of the nation, argues that the Benes decrees were historically justified -- and irreversible.

In a landmark 1995 speech at Prague's Charles University, he renounced the efforts of Sudeten Germans to rekindle the issue, blaming their expulsion squarely on "the fatal failing of a great part of our country's German-born citizens, who gave preference to [Hitler's] dictatorship.

"... They turned against the foundations of humanity itself," Havel said. "They can never justify that failing."


James Pitkin's e-mail address is jpitkin@praguepost.cz