Mgr. Anna Vinterová

“We watched the TV daily, watching how the Soviet and their allied armies, but mainly the Russians, how they crisscrossed Eastern Slovakia and were still not about to leave the republic. But there they already anticipated that they would occupy us. And my sister wanted me to stay there. She said she would get me a job, that I shouldn’t be worried, but I didn’t agree to it for two reasons. First, it was before my final exams and I had had all my classes finished. And my parents suffered heavily that my sister Marie had married to Algeria and since 1949 they hadn’t seen her until the 1960s. I remember still being in bed one morning, when my mother came and said: ‘They’re occupying us.’ And said: ‘Come listen to the radio.’ So I got up real quick and we listened to the radio together with my father in the kitchen. And I remember she then said: ‘Listen, this doesn’t look good, we’ve experienced this with the Germans already. Please, here is some money, go shopping.’ I know she wanted me to buy some flour and some butter, for starters. So I… the queues had been long at that point already. And on August 21, I was studying in the garden, listening to the radio I had with me. And from the radio I learned that they were coming from Aš, that it was in our area. I heard them break the fence and a moment later you could hear the tanks.”

“When things got tough, when the metro was closed between East and West Berlin and then when the wall was built and you could see there, across Studánka… I walked to school, for example, and saw families or people walking there and in a little while there was whistling and roaring and the border guards were there, and they took them away. They used to have this wrong impression that it would be easier to get to West Germany via the Aš Hook, or the republic. And as I said before, there were many incidents of people trying to cross the border. But usually I only learned about it later, or it ended up in different ways. But once, it was a Sunday morning, I went to Studánka and saw an extended order of soldiers and heard shouting, commands, because I had lived up above there… It was spring, not summer quite yet as it was not the summer holiday but sometime before that. So, my windows were open and then there was massive gunfire. And the following day I learned that a sixteen-year-old boy from Hranice who had tried to cross the border had been shot. I don’t know what got into his head. He must have known it there, how it worked; I don’t know. Of course, people tried to escape there. The wires were usually far away from the actual border. When it was in the forest, then the longer it was, the route to the actual border. When there was a field or a meadow behind, it was closer. But if it was a field, someone had to farm it. So, screened people, usually from Hranice, were let there, to do the necessary work and come back again. And I would say that I know about maybe two or three cases when they didn’t come back. They just waved at them and walked off.”