Bruno Fischer

"At nineteen, I was supposed to go to the military service, of course. That was just the beginning and middle of the sixties when there was a big emigration of Germans to Germany, the original inhabitants. It was called family reunification, Familienzusammenführung, where it was possible to move in with relatives, parents, siblings or aunts. Under the conditions here, each person had to pay 10,000 crowns, regardless of adult or child, simply three people, thirty thousand crowns. That was one thing. The second thing was that one could export what one could. We also wanted to move out, and we had quite a lot of books. I had to make a list and have a certificate from the State Scientific Library in Pilsen that these were the books I could take out. Not so much from an ideological point of view, like Mein Kampf, there was nothing like that, but if they were not some antique books, which I understand. I still have all these papers and applications at home. I know that in those days, people were moving and taking things away in cattle cars, that's what I was doing in those days on the railroad. People were transporting furniture and all sorts of things, I remember that. We were going to apply but we didn't even apply, so I got a two-year adjournment. Long story short, we didn't move out because my parents never - I'm surprised they were so optimistic, I guess they were hoping - they never put together 30,000, considering what their pensions were and how much a car cost back then, a regular Škoda cost twenty grand and who had a car back then? Thirty grand was out of the question, so we stayed here."

"My parents had a minimum pension. My mom started with three hundred, and my dad had seven or eight hundred. We were a very poor family because the pension was insufficient. My parents wanted me to go to the general secondary school of those days after primary school, so I would have some education. After a twelve-year school, you don't know anything, but you have some education. I remember that it was a big misery. My parents were so anxious for me to go to that school that they were indeed starving. I remember to this day that I had a chocolate gingerbread for a snack that cost two crowns, that was all I could have. Then, with lunch, they paid for it somehow, but at home, we were really poor."