Dear Lister There is definitely some truth to it; "being ashamed" to in particular the people who languished In the starvation camps. Basically for two reasons. I was 9 years old when we were expelled from our home April 15 1945. My grandmother would load our wheelbarrow with essential and did walk with the load our way from Batschsentiwan to Filipowa.  In Filipowa we had to load on a train after being there for two weeks to be shipped to Gakowa. We had to march between two rows of partisans to whom we had to show what we have and they took everything they wanted from the people. Having only the clothes on our back we lived for two years in Gakowa. Naturally the children outgrew their clothing and had to resort to making clothes out of whatever they still had and my grandmother made clothes out of "Jute Sack" for us. My aunt who was a seamstress had needles and I had found scissors in Filipowa as thread they used thread they took from some clothes and Jute. Now we were running around in these clothes till we reached Austria. We can imagine how we looked, but we were not  the only ones, others were forced to do the same.  The second reason was our dialect and the fact that most of our people did only have 6 years of schooling and had a difficult time to communicate in a dialect they were not familiar.  I myself like many of us lost 3 years of schooling and now practically had to start over. Some were not even able to do this especially those children who lost some 5 years of schooling. Our people once very proud people with beautiful Trachten now were walking around in rags and were often looked at from the side. The mother if one of my friends was a wonderful women and I was eating many times in their house and she would say; it does not matter what clothes I was wearing as long as they were neatly mended and clean. There is nothing to be ashamed of it.   Hans