RNDr. Mojmír Vlašín

"Well, it meant that in Větřní, for example, where there was a huge paper mill, all the waste water was discharged directly into the river. So the river was rotting, the river was rotting so badly that when you came to Český Krumlov, for example, today it is a pearl of a monument that tourists from all over the world come to see. And then you really felt sick. And I have to say that I saw with my own eyes how tourists threw up there. Because it really was like stepping into a cesspool. And there was just no cleaning, because that would sort of hinder the development of socialism and the building of communism. So the sewage was going straight into the river. The chimneys had no filters. The only thing that was done was to build chimneys higher and higher so that the fumes would get into the upper atmosphere and disperse more, or fly off to the neighbours. That was the strategy of the communist regime at that time. So there were sort of formal instructions on how to reduce pollution, but nobody paid attention to them because the main objective was to fulfil the plan. And whoever fulfilled the plan could do whatever they wanted."

"The construction itself had enormously negative consequences, especially in Šumava, which have not been fully resolved to date. In what way? Two things in particular. If the Iron Curtain ran through a peat bog, the peat bog was artificially drained, or at least huge amounts of material were brought in to build the barriers and to build the road. That was the first thing. And the second thing: the wires were actually doubled. There was one wall of wires and a second wall of wires to that first wall of wires. That was the signal wall where there were thin wires that if they were touched or broken, a flare would go off. Then they knew when a flare went off, which sometimes was caused by wild boar or game or a tree falling, but when a flare went off, the border troopers would go to that spot. Between that signal wall and the actual wires, which was a four-metre wall of barbed wire, there was a strip that was ploughed and raked so that you could see that there were footprints. And that was constantly groomed in the summer, in the winter, and pretty harsh pesticides were used to make sure that there was no grass growing there, just to see the footprints of any so-called trespassers. So these effects of the Iron Curtain were clearly negative. But the positive was not the Iron Curtain itself, but the fact that it was not entered without permission. That nobody went there, except those people who had the permits."