Josef Borsik

"When they started nationalising everything in Romania and made collective farms, they, of course, confiscated all the fields, we weren´t even allowed to harvest our grapes because the fields were guarded by armed Romanians. Naturally, we were frightened. What I also remember is that a car arrived. We had a new fence made of boards right then, it still smelled of fresh wood. We liked this a lot. There, the fences were made of sticks, there were no forests and wood was expensive. My brother left for Bohemia in 1947 because of the transfer being done. Some 3 and a half million Germans had to leave the Sudetenland and suddenly there was no substitute for them. For example in Aš, only 20% of the original inhabitants remained. Then there were reemigrants, and the Czechs who came from Plzeň and God knows where else. Suddenly, the gate opened, the car hooted, which was quite an unusual thing for me. I ran out quickly and there was a Tudor, or who knows what it was, a Czech car and two people. A man in a leather coat and a woman heavily made up, which surprised me a lot. They tried to recruit us, the people who lived in Slavic regions, the Czech and Slovak villages. They were telling us what we´d have and what we wouldn´t have. And they managed to persuaded my brother. He came to Aš. He was apprenticed as a shoemaker. When he came here, he was already an adult man born in 1929. He was able to run a shop and do shoe repairs. There was a post office, of course a German one, and he was given a “national administrative position“. And later he bought the shop. But then the Great February came with the same result as in Romania. Everything was nationalised."

"I had to go to school. We arrived in August and already in September I had to go to the 1st class although I was 9 years old. It was already a Czech school. But I also had German schoolmates – the Grunsts and the Adlers – and many other girls who went to the same class. I started my schooling in Anger Gasse, the oldest school in Aš. There lived a caretaker and Mr Kršňák, the headmaster, and there were classrooms which were heated. There was an enormous tiled stove, and when it was cold, we had to heat it up. As older kids, we were on duty to do this and look after it. The stove gave up enough heat until late in the afternoon. I liked being at school but we were divided into classes. It was - I don´t want to say it – a selection. My wife because she is half Czech and half Slovak, her Czech father came from Nepomuk and her mother from the Tatras, they met in Brno. She came from the Baťa factory and he brought her here. We went to the same school, but she was in the A class and I was in the B class. So, with me there were the Gypsies, Zoli and Petrník, and some German schoolmates, and the A class was strictly Slavonic. She doesn´t realize it, doesn´t admit it, but that was how it was then. Of course, the dominant position of the Czech element was significant because they were the officers who worked here in the First Republic as the police, they were bank and post directors. They were Czechs sent into the German environment. They were not German but these state servants who gave salaries. Otherwise, the Germans stood aside and the Czechs returned after the war to the same posts they had held before. That was strange. But then the year 1948 changed everything."