“My mother was part of a kind of chain of people smugglers. We are from Břeclav, not far from Lanžhot, both on the river Dyje. Back then, people used to flee through the floodplain forest there. It was not yet as tough as in the fifties, when they put electric fences there. It was still more-or-less possible to flee. People from Lanžhot knew about the floodplain forest and how best to get to the river and where the best place to cross the river was. And my mother was a contact for them. Those people would get her contact details. They would come to our house with a backpack and they would sleep at ours, and early the next morning she would take them to the train or bus to Lanžhot. There she passed them on to another smuggler. Then they waited until the moment was right and took the people over the border. She had an autograph album, which she had everyone write or draw something in. They confiscated it from her, but my mother remembers it well and said that she had twenty-seven names in that album. So she didn't even help smuggle that many people over the border, only twenty-seven."
"I remember one moment from the expulsion. It happened when they were all in one place, in this huge refinery, which has since closed down. In one part, behind a barbed wire fence, they gathered all those who were to be expelled. My mother and I stood by that fence and talked to my grandmother. Grandpa didn't want to talk to us at all. He was devastated, he was just sitting somewhere. I remember standing there by that fence talking to my grandma. I don't know what they were saying, I didn't understand. It was difficult in the sense that everyone felt innocent. He had been in Vienna ever since he was a child, he was a trained train driver/engineer. He had got a Franz Josef safety conduct, and then they kick him out for being some kind of immigrant."
"When it came to the moment in which they decided run away, the building’s courtyard was surrounded by a five meter high wall. I have visited the building, although it was already an art school by then, but the five-meter wall was still there. Some windows were replaced since. There were bars in all the windows except one, which was that of a toilet on the very top floor, which was very high up - about ten meters and all concrete below. They didn't think anyone could escape from there. There they tied the rope to the window and the brother climbed onto the roof. There was a shed next door, probably a garage. So they threw the rope over the wall. The doctor, as well as the boy, happened to be climbers. They were part of the Sokol, so they were used to climbing in the mountains, in the Alps and so on. They were pretty experienced. They tied the rope, threw it over. My mother went first, which is when the guards started to try to open the door to the toilet. She said: 'Go next door, try the next toilet, I'm feeling sick.' She pretended to be drunk. She lowered herself down on the rope, and climbed over the corner and onto the roof. Then went the doctor. My mother later bragged that she wasn't a mountaineer and still didn't burn her hands on the rope, whereas the climber had burned hers. And so they got into the car and went off as quickly as they could.”
Edgar Dutka was born on May 21, 1941 in Vienna‘s New Town to Gertruda Dutková, who was not married at the time. He spent his childhood in Břeclav. In 1945, his grandfather was expelled from Czechoslovakia alongside other Germans and with his wife they went to Austria. But after six months in Vienna, where the couple then lived, his grandfather died. After the Communists came to power, Edgar‘s mother became a member of a people smuggling organisation. For this she was arrested in November 1948 and later sentenced to six years in prison for high treason. She served her sentence in the prison in Lomnice nad Popelkou. In March 1950, she and another fellow prisoner, Benešová, managed to escape. She eventually emigrated to Australia. After his mother‘s arrest, Edgar Dutka spent two years in a children‘s home and then lived with his mother‘s cousin‘s family. Between 1964 and 1971 he studied at the Department of Film and Television Screenwriting at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague). In 1968, he went to Australia to visit his mother and returned home in the fall of 1969. From 1971 to 1973, he worked in the screenwriting department of the Barrandov Film Studio, from which he was eventually fired. He then worked as a script editor and later as a screenwriter and director at Jiří Trnka’s Studio and in the Studio Bratři v triku. Today (in 2021) he is retired and lives with his wife Jaroslava, with whom he has a daughter, Dora.
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