“In winter I was riding in my section and inspecting a forest calamity. Two Border Guard troops had their respective areas of responsibility in my section: the troop Javoří Pila and the troop Kvilda. And I would always inform Javoří Pila: I am going to the forest. And the way it worked was that every day, every morning, a secret number was declared and when I rode out on my cross-country skis I had to write the number in the snow and they would know that I was somebody who knew the number and not somebody who was escaping to Germany. The wires were covered in snow and you could thus cross them easily, but people did not know that. I was skiing through my forest as usual, but the patrol from Kvilda noticed some ski tracks and they followed them. I was going back and forth all over the forest and when I later saw them, I remarked: ‘Look there…’ There were two completely exhausted soldiers. And their dog was totally worn-out, too. ‘You were following my tracks?’ And they arrested me immediately. I asked them: ‘You mean you want to shoot me? I work here as a forester.’ No way… submachine guns. I said: ‘What do you want to do with me? I live in Filipova Huť, I work here as a forester.’ They didn’t care. There was a downhill slope, it is called Hunter’s Rock. I said: ‘I am not going down by foot. I am skiing down.’ The idiots stopped up there and I thought that if it seemed like I was running away, they were so scared and shocked that they would be able to shoot at me, wouldn’t they? They held me at gunpoint and they did not want to hear any explanation. To them, I was no forester, they believed that I was somebody who wanted to escape. I told them: ‘I will wait for you under the hill, you know who I am, anyway.’ They were even considering that they would tie their dog to me.”
“What one needed there was an entry permit to the border zone. That was because the iron curtain was set some seven or ten kilometres inland from the actual state border, and there was a so-called border zone in front of that iron curtain. I was a forester and I was on duty in the border zone. The military counterintelligence revoked my entry permit and I don’t know why and I don’t care. Perhaps it was partly because my wife was a daughter of the original inhabitants of Šumava, of Sudeten Germans. We had a child and I believed that my job was secure. And suddenly an officer from the Border Guard comes to you and says: ‘Give me your permit.’ I contacted the director of the Forestry Company in Kašperské Hory at that time and I told him: ‘Director, the range of the Forestry Company Kašperské Hory extends from Nepomuk all the way to Filipova Huť and there are quite a lot of places where I could work as a forester.’ But he told me that for him, I was worthy only in Modrava. I had no choice but to accept the fact that I would never get the permit and that I had lost my job. I had to move inland, and I ended up in Křivoklát. My wife, who had deep roots in the Šumava Mountains, could not imagine living somewhere else. And so our family broke up.”
“We witnessed some absurd situations, such as when they were building roads in the border zone and there was for example a truck and it transported an excavator there. And although the truck driver had a permit for the border zone, he was accompanied by a soldier, and the soldier watched the driver and an officer went with the soldier and he watched both of them. Really, those were funny stories. But it does not matter anymore and I can speak about it. Some women were to work in my forest section and plant trees and one of them had a permit into the border zone, but it did not allow her to come near the state border itself; there were two categories of permits. The women smuggled her in there in the car using somebody else’s permit. I was looking for her in the forest and I went to the forest administration office and I said: ‘Boss. The women had probably smuggled Irena in.’ He said: ‘You need to deal with it, otherwise we have a problem.’ So I went to the Border Guard guys who did their basic military service there and I told them: ‘Guys, you have let a woman without a permit go to the state border. We should get in the car and go fetch her so that there is no problem, because when she goes back, somebody might check her documents.’ They replied: ‘We are not allowed to go there, we need to make something up.’ They telephoned their operation officer of the Border Guard troop. They always had to report that they were going abroad if they went behind the wires. And there had to be three of them in that GAZ car, not only one. They watched one another so that nobody would run away.”
Antonín Schubert was born on March 6, 1960 in Karlovy Vary and he spent his childhood in Potůčky in Krušné Hory (Erzgebirge, Ore Mountains). He was living in Modrava since the age of fifteen, he studied at the vocational training school of forestry there and later he worked there as a gamekeeper. He experienced his first encounter with counterintelligence as a nineteen-year- old when he and his parents received a permit to exchange foreign currency and they travelled in the German part of the Šumava Mountains. His return was followed by an interrogation which lasted for several hours. Antonín also experienced other absurd situations while working as a gamekeeper. He was arrested twice during a regular patrol, even though the troop commander knew him personally. He received the hardest blow when his permit for the entry to the border zone was revoked without reason in 1987. Without the permit, he was no longer able to work as a forester in Modrava and he therefore moved to the Křivoklát region in order to be able to keep working in his profession. However, since his wife came from an old German family from Šumava and she could not imagine living somewhere else, she did not want to move there and Antonín believes this was the cause for the break-up of their marriage. He considers it unjust that both counterintelligence officers who had negatively impacted lives of many people later worked for the customs administration after the Velvet Revolution. Antonín Schubert was the mayor of Modrava since 1994. He died on December 28, 2022.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
