Robert Ospald

“We arrived at a German board which said ‘Nur für Eireilhen’. We tried to remember this as we had nothing to note it down with. Whenever we took our eyes away from the board, the letters disappeared. We gave up after the fifth attempt. We kept returning to the board. ‘Do you remember it?’ — ‘No, you?’ — ‘No.’ Well, so we gave it up, but we still thought this was an important notice as it confirmed to us that we were in Austria indeed. Then we entered a village, a small village with vineyard houses in which no one lives. And as I looked into those abandoned windows, I remembered someone telling me that the border patrol used to come to Germany and Austria to bring people from there back. And I said, ‘Frankie, if they appear here, do the same thing I will do but at a different house. We will throw our cart into the window. The people will not be willing to pay for the repair so they will call the police. These could save us. If they learn that we fled they will send in soldiers to fetch us back in.”

“I had — well, how many days are there in a year — 365 unexcused absences. Unexcused. There must have been some excused ones. I had mark three for my conduct and three fives in the school report. And they came from Ostrava to recruit new miners. I told myself, “I am fed up here, I am going to Ostrava.’ So I applied. They were very happy until they saw my school report. And they said to my teachers: ‘No way!’ To be a miner you needed at worst two for conduct and four as the worst mark. The teachers held a meeting and — not to spoil my life opportunities, or so they said — they changed the marks on my school report.”

“Well, it was no joke, we were running out of everything. A few tins and some lemonade, but that ran out very quickly, and then we had to cross the path to get water. His nerves snapped, he said he’d rather go without water, but I knew that without water you start going delirious, so I would go for the water myself. And it was basically somewhere here. Here, where the footpath crosses under the power line.” (Q: “There’s a stream on the map here - was that where you took the water from?”) “No, no. You couldn’t, because that isn’t a stream, it’s more of a quagmire. You couldn’t take the water from there, so I always went like this: I would crawl along the ground, look round to see which way the soldier was turned. This was where the gate was, which they used when they went to smooth up the dirt strip.” And always when I saw he was turned away from me, I rushed across. There’s a line of trees here, and there was a kerb leading along it with irrigation, and that’s where I took the water. I was asking for it, of course, because over here it was a huge big meadow, completely unsheltered, and here was where the border guards had one of their lookouts. So I had to peer out from inside the bushes and wait for them to turn way. Then I filled up with water and legged it back.”

“But those were the first trolleys, which were rather more heavy, and then we realised that it was quite a weight to pull around... an awful strain, and I even had a Czech-English dictionary with me, quite a big one. It was heavy, I thought I’d let out my last breath. It was so exhausting: because each time a car went by, we would jump over the guide rail and lie down into the ditch. We let the car drive past and then continued. That was a wallop - because the first ones were made of rectangular pipes, the second ones were a bit better. There was a heap of aluminium, or duralumin, or what on it. The first one was practically all out of iron. We waited there until evening, we went almost the whole night, then slept through the day, then we found out we had clambering up there completely pointlessly, because we had to go home and change the trolleys, because there wasn’t enough space under the wheel for the rollers to go through.”

“There’s no cold in that kind of situation. The adrenalin, as they call it today, is pretty high. And up there, that was also interesting: when I had the trolley hung up with pieces of climbing rope that were holding it. So I let it fall away from me towards the structure, and I loosened it by about a metre. And it started going like this [imitating a crunching noise]. I thought: what was that, it’ll give us away. Such a cracking noise like when you snap twigs. Such a cracking. So I pulled the trolley closer again and loosened it once more to see what happened. And even though the inner wheel had a relatively small diameter, there were five to ten centimetre sparks arcing over from it to the rope. When I showed it to Frankie, his immediate reaction was: We’re going home. So I remembered the bloke I met in the prison cell when I was fifteen. And I said: get back to it. He was already hoping I would say we should give up. But I said: come on. We’ve got a chance here, back there we’d just rot in a communism that is supposed to last forever with the Soviet Union. I can’t stand that. I don’t have that amount of time. So we went on.”

“But we carried on and reached Jetzelsdorf, and that’s where we met the first people. No, the cop was the first actually, that was in Kleinhaugsdorf. That was interesting, because all of a sudden a cop appeared in the doorway of a house. A shock for us, of course: they’ll send us back to the Czechs, they won’t send us back to the Czechs, but they’ll certainly interrogate us and go through the whole awful ceremony, like they did back home. And so I whispered aside: Frankie, we’re not going past him. It’s always better when you offer yourself up, and so I said ‘Good morning’ to him in English. And he just shrugged his shoulders. So I tried Czech, Polish, Slovak. I went back to English: Only German? He immediately started spouting words at me, of course I didn’t understand a word of it. So I pointed at myself: Sorry, I don’t, meaning I don’t speak German. So he shrugged his shoulders again. And at that moment a car drove up, and I said: Frankie, this is effed, he’s probably got some kind of walkie-talkie, he switched it on without us noticing, and now they’re here to snatch us away. And he walked calmly to the car, got in, and drove off. And we were left standing on the street like idiots, staring at the departing car, our minds as blank as if they had just released us from Šternberk [a famous Czech mental hospital - ed.] - and we looked, wow, we’re out! And then came the famous words: I’m free, I’m free, I’m free.”

“That was awfully hilarious, I had a Solidarita there, and they even let me hide the Solidarita right in front of them. It was - you know how the Lada cars had this box around the gear stick, well it was stuck - where it goes down, there’s a crack there, and I rammed it into that. And they called me into the car, and wherever I looked, they told me to search. I quickly realised how things worked, so I didn’t look at the steering wheel, where the money was hidden, and at the box where the Solidarita was. I’d be in deep trouble for anti-state whatnot. Suddenly one of the chaps said: we didn’t look under the box there. So I thought to myself that it was a good thing that I had to lift it myself, and so I unscrewed the knob with the gear numbers, I lifted the box and heard the rustle of paper. So I caught it, it fell into my hand, and I squeezed it off to one side. It was clear to me that I couldn’t put it back again. I shook the box and then put it away on the back seat.”