Arnošt Vošahlík

"In 1968 I was finishing [my time at the military service], and then they moved us to this hop picking and then they moved us to the border near Tachov, it was called Halže, some village called Halže. And we were enlisted there with the BG, the border guards, and since I had a construction background, they used us for construction work and border guards with machine guns came to guard us. It was the first time I saw how it was done on the border. I wasn't surprised that few people got out, then I saw why they didn't. There were watchtowers, observation posts, so we looked into West Germany. Here they were fooling around that they were going to invade us, it wasn't true then! No troops were standing on the border with us in Germany. We climbed up, that's thirty meters, the lookout tower was, so we always went after work to look. Families used to go there for the weekend with their cars, walk around, beautifully landscaped villages, and we'd fool around, listen to see if they were saying anything to each other on the air. And once a day an American helicopter flew over, no soldiers on the border like here, it wasn't there. There was one border guard that went past, and always only at a certain hour."

"How many times, for example, prisoners escaped, so they rarely succeeded because it was wired everywhere. And we could see straight from Buk to the Vojna camp, to Lešetice, that was it, that was where the prisoners went to work. Well, when they escaped, we saw flares shooting, and lots of troops in the villages, combing even at night, guarding. Because here near Příbram, in Dubno, as the training school is today, there was an army, the internal guard it was called, my first brother-in-law served in that, and they were called from those barracks to raid against those prisoners. And then, I think, there was a barracks in Brod for the inner guard, and they used to serve against prisoners' riots and various... That's the way it was. And how many times we used to go like that, because there was another thing at Buk, there were many buses going there, first to the shafts via Milín to Kamenná, there were the first shafts, Lešetice, Vojna, or again to Jerusalem, or to Bytíz. And there were a lot of people changing trains there, even the guards, and you could see what kind of thugs they were! They were just, they said something, and the word was valid. We, as children, perceived it as horror, because we were afraid of them, because they were changing buses there in uniforms. Well, I'm not going to name them anymore, because that would be too much."

"I think it was about 1952, and that memory has stayed with me all my life. When I remember that time when they were forcing the cooperative farm, it was the beginning of the 1950s. In 1952 there was an inspection, they were going after these farmers to check the condition of the seed, the potato stocks and all sorts of things. They did an inspection at our place, I don't know if it was at other places, but probably it was, but one perceived it more at home. Because I didn't understand it that much and I was actually afraid of what would happen, what would be taken away from my parents or left behind, one perceived it through the eyes of a child. So I remember some of the members of the commission, apart from the chairman, I think it was Mr Štěpán Bejček, Mrs Bejčka, that was his wife, she was a nice lady, she was writing it down on the typewriter and I can still hear the clatter of the typewriter."