Josef Borsik

"I had to go to school. We arrived in August and already in September I had to go to the 1st class although I was 9 years old. It was already a Czech school. But I also had German schoolmates – the Grunsts and the Adlers – and many other girls who went to the same class. I started my schooling in Anger Gasse, the oldest school in Aš. There lived a caretaker and Mr Kršňák, the headmaster, and there were classrooms which were heated. There was an enormous tiled stove, and when it was cold, we had to heat it up. As older kids, we were on duty to do this and look after it. The stove gave up enough heat until late in the afternoon. I liked being at school but we were divided into classes. It was - I don´t want to say it – a selection. My wife because she is half Czech and half Slovak, her Czech father came from Nepomuk and her mother from the Tatras, they met in Brno. She came from the Baťa factory and he brought her here. We went to the same school, but she was in the A class and I was in the B class. So, with me there were the Gypsies, Zoli and Petrník, and some German schoolmates, and the A class was strictly Slavonic. She doesn´t realize it, doesn´t admit it, but that was how it was then. Of course, the dominant position of the Czech element was significant because they were the officers who worked here in the First Republic as the police, they were bank and post directors. They were Czechs sent into the German environment. They were not German but these state servants who gave salaries. Otherwise, the Germans stood aside and the Czechs returned after the war to the same posts they had held before. That was strange. But then the year 1948 changed everything."

"Of course, there was this problem here with the border. It looks as if these 60 years were strange, but they were actually awful. We don´t realize it. After 1951, the whole Aš was surrounded by the state border with an electric fence. Here was the border zone. Soldiers were given guard houses to patrol, each every 200m, so that the guards could see each other. Then there was a fence of three-fold columns with barbed wire and with electric power in the middle. And this was along the whole western border. Imagine how horrid it was. Access to Aš was impossible. Before, it was a free city. German girls from Selb and Hoff used to come here to work in textile factories, and our girls went to work to the Selb porcelain factories. And suddenly the border was closed and there was only one way of entering Aš, from Hazlov. There was a military guard standing there, they had a guard house and a barrier, and whoever came had to show documents. When he/she didn´t have a stamp with permission to enter the border zone, he/she couldn´t. This was the border zone, it was closed. Right next to the border there was a forbidden zone and all the houses built within 200m from the border had to be demolished. Imagine that during the war they built a new town quarter “Nový svět“ and all these new houses had to be demolished when the border zone was created. Bulldozers came nad cleared the area making the border zone so that nobody could escape, and they built this ridiculous fence which was demolished only in 1989. I have somewhere here..I made myself a crown of thorns from this barbed wire fence, which I helped to tear down in 1989. Until then, everything was closed up so that you couldn´t go either here or there. I didn´t realize this as a child that we were so restricted. When somebody wanted to come to us, relatives from Slovakia, they had to have an official document first from us, then from their side saying that they were Slovaks and really the relatives of our Anička, and all this nonsense. Everything was under control."