Helmut Haselberger

“I was sitting in front of the TV. My wife had already gone to bed and our youngest son - he was already at the age when you start to go out. So I was watching a movie; I was still sitting there and our son Peter, who came home then, at a point when I was still sitting in front of the TV, he came come and walked into the living room. I was sitting in the chair besides the table and he pulled out a bottle of beer and put it on the table. He asked me: ‘would you like Czech beer?’ I asked him where the heck he’d gotten Czech beer from. And he said: ‘we were in Kvilda’. I’m sure he said Kvilda. I couldn’t believe my ears. They met some Czech boys at the border who persuaded them to cross the border with them and go to Kvilda. They went there on a moped or something like that. So he went to the Bohemian side of the border and came back with a bottle of Czech beer for me. So that really was one of the first signs for me that the situation was loosening up a little bit and that the border was beginning to open up. Gradually, more and more visitors from the East started arriving at the border.”

“My uncle, who had owned this house here, once took me fishing with him. I believe that my wife interrupted us. He had such a special fishing technique which he used to catch fish hiding underneath stones. Sometimes, a fish hides in a niche and if you’re skillful enough, you can catch it with your hand. When the fish is trapped in a niche from where it is hard for it to escape. So once, me, my uncle and another friend crossed to border to the Bohemian side. On the other side, my uncle walked through a creek with almost no water in it over to the other side and there, he lay down on the ground on his chest and plunged his arm into the water to catch the fish. He didn’t catch anything but suddenly, two Czechoslovak border guards appeared out of nowhere. I was eight years old back then – or somewhere in between eight to ten years, I think. So we were really keen for what was going to happen. But they were very friendly, they spoke German with him and they exchanged cigarettes with my uncle. Of course, for me as a child and for my friend, it was a new experience. Because otherwise, there were virtually no contacts at all, no encounters with people from the other side of the border.”

“I can’t say that we perceived it as a threat. It was something else. We felt like we were living on the edge of the world. The shape of the border reinforced this feeling. You know, you could go down in the direction of southeast and then you had the national park here, but that was it. It was limited to going into and out of Finsterau. That was basically all you could do. There was only one direction there for us. When you were in Freyung, you could also turn towards Austria, maybe also in the direction of Deggendorf or Munich, etc. But here, it was more or less a dead end; we were trapped here in Finsterau. That was, I would say, a very burdensome feeling.”

“At that point, we were married and our two sons were about eight to ten years old. It was then when we decided: ‘let’s meet with them someday’. But they were not allowed to come over here, at least not as a family. Nevertheless, we were allowed to travel to Bohemia, I mean the former Czechoslovakia. We applied for a visa and then met our family in Prague. We were looking for a hotel to stay at but it was difficult to find a suitable one for us. We finally stayed at the Sport Hotel but it was not an ideal place to reside in. The toilet on our floor didn’t flush but we were actually glad that we managed to find a place to stay at all. A little episode I recall: In the hotel, we sat down with my family at a table, a bit separated from the others. There were not many people there – a few Czechs were sitting at the bar. We were sitting a bit in the back with my family and had much to tell each other. We remained there for quite some time and then, it was around 10 o’clock in the evening, they turned off the light in that room. They wanted to go home or maybe just to get rid of us, I don’t know, but I have to say that they were not necessarily the friendliest people on earth at that point. Anyway, the next day, I needed to exchange money, some 20 or 50 Deutschmark, and I offered the bartender to exchange my Deutschmark for Crowns. I saw a huge smile on his face since then we were welcome guests. They probably had seen the little GDR cruiser in front of the hotel the day before, the Trabi, I mean. So they had thought we were East Germans. But when he saw my West-German Deutschmark, the man completely changed. He became a different person in a second.”

“There was a guy in Finsterau who was called the ‘Schwarzei’ or ‘Schwarzer’, meaning basically a small black man. It was probably derived from the word ‘Schwirzen’, which means as much as to smuggle in this area. So a Schwirzer basically was a smuggler, because a smuggler had to rub his face all black in order not to shine. So a Schwirzer may be translated as a ‘blacker’, or ‘blackened’. It’s hard to translate to High German but here in Bavaria, it means ‘smuggler’. He apparently had the courage and the knowledge of the spots where you could cross the border. He would, of course, smuggle all sorts of valuables and also news for relatives of people who had fled across the border. However, one day, he was reportedly caught by the border guards and put in jail. He allegedly served 10 years in prison and came back a relatively broken man. He didn’t last for a long time after he came back.”