Dr. Hubert Roiss

„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.“