Oldřich Kalousek

“Except that the nearer it got, and especially as we had had our service extended three months extra, I convinced myself all the more that I would not sign. Even though in my file I had: The uniform suits me nicely, I am a soldier body and soul. As with other things in life, I simply tried to do it honestly and properly. I guess that’s why things ended up how they did, why I ended up choosing my craft instead.”

“Most people think it was the border that was guarded, the actual border. The actual border was not guarded.” (Q:“Please explain what you mean by that.”) “They created a so-called border zone, that was a section of land about 30 to 40 kilometres perpendicular to the state border, but it varied depending on the terrain. That was marked with signs: ‘Warning, border zone, authorised entry only’. There were people who lived in the border zone, they had it written in their ID card, and that actually served as a permission to enter the border zone.”

“The so-called forbidden zone was another matter altogether. There were signs there, the signs marked in black, the forbidden zone had the same big signs marked in red, and they had on them: Warning, forbidden zone, all entry forbidden. The forbidden zone was created precisely so as to give the Border Guard space to manoeuvre, and mainly for when shots were fired, to keep to international regulations, that is that bullets were not allowed to land on foreign soil, all this was upheld.”

“We weren’t there to shoot people - as one good man said it, a long time ago... so I talked him out of it - to shoot people like rabbits. When there was a breach, every breach was a so-called extraordinary event. These extraordinary events were perfectly mapped and documented. It wasn’t that, as one good man said: ‘They were shooting people left, right and centre.’ Nonsense! An extraordinary event was when there was a breach or a detention, whether anyone was detained or not, whether weapons were used or not, it was always documented as an extraordinary event.”