Joachim Mewes

"I still remember one beautiful situation, how all those May Day and all the festivities were obligatory. We were once called to the school to pick up the Russian flags there and to hand them over there as well. It was such a system that made attendance and presence in the procession obligatory. We couldn't avoid it, that we had to meet there at that school. But in that procession, we chose those communist children who were not, say, very understanding. And I said to one of them, 'Look, you can hold the banner for me, I want to tie a shoelace.' And he ended up with ten flags and had to carry them all back to school, the exmplary communist son. I don't know if he acted on his own initiative, as he was a real fan of communism. After the revolution (in 1989), he would still proudly show us his communist party ID."

„Two groups of people gathered in Karlovy Vary after the war. It was the Communists who were building socialism and helping on the border with much enthusiasm, and then those, who were sent there as a punishment. And my mom and I found ourselves in this mixture. However, she immediately lost the job she found after three months, because the framing was being perfected and they found out that she was politically inappropriate, so they fired her. We have worked hard enough in early socialism. Sometimes, for example, I did not eat for three days, not to mention the absence of any washing, my mother did not have any money to pay the rent and elektricity; the toilet and water were somewhere in the hallway. It was quite a critical situation overal and she was hopeless, she couldn't find anything. We fought like this for four years. I had the advantage that because she had to worry about finding a job somewhere, she didn't have a husband, so I was alone most of the time. I decided a lot about my own course of the day and developed such a strategy that I always kept out of my peers, who always asked me why I didn't go to school. I used to skip school, and during the day when the stream of children went to school, I seemed to follow them, and then I turned and spent the whole morning somewhere in the woods or in the fields, eating raw potatoes and I was just fine.”