Erwin Kreuzwieser

"Until I was sixteen, we lived in Galgenberg near Slavonice. Before 1945, Slavonice was the centre of the region, where people went shopping. My parents remember it. My maternal grandparents came from the village of Mutná near Slavonice. Before 1945 we were one country. Then suddenly there was a fence. Everything what was behind the fence was bad. When we went mushroom picking, we had to be careful not to get close to the border. If someone went too close, he was taken to České Budějovice and had to pay a fine. Then they let him go. We were at the end of the world."

"Nationalism plays a role. In the northern region of the Waldviertel, in 1921 there a border was made there and fourteen villages that had previously been Austrian were suddenly part of Czechoslovakia. It was strange for everyone. Then, when the Czechs were not well off, the German Reich made the same mistake as the Czechs. This tension, which is perhaps being processed a little bit now, it was absolutely present here. There is still the generation that experienced 1945, or their parents told them about it, that they lost something in Czechoslovakia, e.g. their relatives. You can't just erase that."