Ing. Josef Bauer

“Someone was going from their shopping and tomatoes were flying at the soldiers all the time. And you could see that the Russian soldiers had an order and were not allowed to do anything. But the atmosphere was tense sometimes, sometimes they pulled the machine guns off from their shoulders and started to point them at people. So I know that everyone... However, I did not see that they would fight with anyone or that a shooting would occur or that there would be dead people, I did not see it.”

“The nationalization was unclear and the town defended itself. So we came there to make a deal so that nothing was left for the town and we were amazed by it. There were some eight-hundred or nine-hundred coffins in one of the related buildings. All of them were the same, black ones with silver marks. One coffin after another. We had to take out a loan for it in 1990. They had around eight-hundred thousand coffins in stock back then, I mean in 1990. And we did not know what to do with them, so in the end, we burnt them. Because in 1991 or 1992, the bereaved people came and said: ‘We will choose a coffin.‘ So those were lying there and were used as firewood.”