Dr. Hubert Roiss

* 1947

  • „The problem is that politics get mixed up among people. An ideology is transmitted, which may be mistakenly accepted and people cease to understand each other. When people behave completely like normal people, it doesn't matter what language they speak... And it was the same with my family history, my mother and my grandparents lived in Prague, where bilingualism was completely normal and they also had Jewish fellow citizens. Half of my mother's high school classmates were Jewish. When I think about it, it's a collective trauma that we carry with us. But also in my grandmother's village, where my mother was born, there was a Czech castle owner, and his family and children grew up in a bilingual environment... They lived normally regardless of language.“

  • „A point that I consider very important... the year 1945. Czech Commissioner Josef Chýle, who had previously been a customs officer in Cetviny, knew all the people there and kept a protective hand over Cetviny. So there was no act of violence, no violence. And we visited him and his wife in Benešov immediately after the revolution, and we are still in contact with his daughter. This is very important, there is another daughter whose father was the head of customs in Cetviny in 1938. Only the customs office was not in the Czechoslovak Republic, but on the Austrian side - the so-called Exmühle. And in 1938, shortly before the annexation of Czechoslovakia as part of this conflict, raids by the Sudeten German Freikorps on individual stations began, there were 4,000 Freikorps members in Austria, there was a large raid in which 29 Czech officials, six women, two children were kidnapped and interned, and the head of customs, Mr. Smržina, was not arrested, he was only interned, he could escape, his daughter then went to school there, she is 92 years old today. We are in contact with her and these are very nice human stories.“

  • „Of course, we felt, if I may say so, that the Czechs know everything. And now, in retrospect, based on my research in the archives of the state secret police, it is clear to me that in each place one or two Austrian citizens carried out espionage for the secret police in Czechoslovakia. And actually, from today's point of view, they "delivered" completely meaningless simple information. Often it was perhaps a certain emergency, a financial need. For such a task they received 300-600 shillings, you have to multiply that once or twice when converting to EURO (meaning crowns). We knew that, and it was like that in all important areas such as the post office, regional governorships, provincial governments, and it went all the way to the Vatican - the secret police had their spies everywhere.“

  • „In the post-war period, we could actually experience the old structure of the village. Only after 1945 did the mechanisation of agriculture begin. There was still a certain self-sufficiency in the village, with a shoemaker, a carpenter and others... Then everything changed, the first tractors arrived. My grandparents managed a small farm: we had four cows, a few pigs. There were no paved streets, no water supply system, we had to carry water from a well in the village. Experiencing this time was and remains very interesting for me. How people lived... We have to imagine - during the First Austrian Republic there was misery everywhere, a lot of misery, unemployment, but the situation was certainly better than in Czechoslovakia.“

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Freistadt, 02.09.2020

    (audio)
    délka: 55:09
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu  Stories of the Czech-Austrian Borderland KPF-01-210
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

We had to work harder, but we saved ourselves from forty years of communism

Hubert Roiß as chairman of the "Forum for the Future of Freiwald" (since 1985)
Hubert Roiß as chairman of the "Forum for the Future of Freiwald" (since 1985)
zdroj: archive of Hubert Roiss

Hubert Roiss was born on November 21, 1947 in Windhaag bei Freistadt, Austria. The history of his family is connected with the now almost defunct town of Cetviny (Zettwing in German) in southern Bohemia, close to the Austrian border. His father Karl enlisted in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War and was captured by the British. After the war, the family left the border town of Cetviny for Austria and settled in nearby Windhaag bei Freistadt. Hubert Roiss studied teaching and in the years 1976-2009 taught history and geography at the Bad Leonfelden High School and at the same time for twelve years at the Freistadt Gymnasium. In the years 1979–1991 he was the mayor of Windhaag bei Freistadt. In addition to a number of municipal projects, he initiated the creation of the Waldhaus in Mühlviertel and five other small museums. In particular, in the role of chairman of the „Forum for the Future“ (from 1985) and the „Mühlviertel Museum Route“ (1996-2019), he developed long-term regional and cross-border impulses.