Vladimír Frenzl

"I remember vividly to this day a well-known popular actor, I won't name him, who was driving with his wife and transporting undeclared goods. There was quite a lot of it, radios, sound equipment, whatever they were carrying at the time. Smiles until we opened the car. He was hauling a lot, it would have been a criminal case. We were judging social danger, and a secondary indicator was the value of the goods. Maybe he was counting on the customs officer seeing a familiar face and turning a blind eye. You could already see that something was wrong, you could see it in the person, even if he was a professional actor. You can see it in his behaviour when you've had practice. You look in the boot and you think, 'Oh my, this is a bit weird,' you sense that if you were putting it in there yourself, you would have put it together differently. It'll click. This guy had a lot of stuff in there, he got embarrassed. I said, 'Wrap it up, make it look like nothing. You know a former classmate of mine. Give her a bottle and tell her it's from me.' He never gave her the bottle. To this day, when I see him on TV, I wonder if he even realized what kind of trouble he got away with."

"Although my grandfather was German, at least on his mother's side, he always acted as a loyal Czechoslovak patriot. When Hitler began his hunt for the hills, the Brown Plague, it was known that the borderlands would not end well, would be torn away, would fall to the German Reich. My grandfather organized a petition that the district - Sušicko Hartmanicko - had always been Czech, it had a majority Czech population. The petition contributed a lot to the fact that after the seizure of the border area in the autumn of 1938, the area remained Czech practically up to Hartmanice. The seizure was up to the outskirts of Pilsen, whereas here it was cut out almost up to Hartmanice, only below them on Krušec was the Protectorate border. He got even, the Germans knew about him, right in March 1939, after the Protectorate was established, he was the first in the district of Susice to be picked up by the Gestapo."