Milan Prokop

"In the summer I went with a friend on a motorbike to Rügen, with a tent. We were there for about a week or two, then we came back. I said to him, 'You know what, let's go to my grandmother's place, we can stay there and it won't be so far away.' Then of course we went to the village to see some girls and where there was some disco dancing. We were sitting at the disco and we noticed that it was somehow different. In earlier years, when a young Czechoslovakian guy came there, the girls would just flock to him because he was an exotic from another country. And now nobody wanted anything to do with us. You could see them pointing at us and whispering. So we sat at the disco all night and then went home. I'm lying in bed and I keep hearing this rumbling, vrum vrum vrum, the house is kind of shaking. In the morning I got up and I said, 'Grandma, what was it tonight?' Grandma said it's been like that for days, the army is going to the Czechoslovak border. Oh, so we didn't think too much about it and went home."

"In Cheb we lived in Lesní Street number 40 in a very interesting villa. It belonged to the factory owner Schmerel, Schmerel was a textile factory owner and before the war he died and inherited the villa from his daughter. His daughter's name was Vinkovičová, she was the wife of a Yugoslav officer who served under the emperor, he died sometime ago and Mrs Vinkovičová lived in the villa with her son. Mrs. Vinkovičová was an Austrian national through her husband, and for a short time she was able to avoid nationalization and confiscation, but then it didn't work, the villa was taken away and Mrs. Vinkovičová had to move into the basement. Her apartment was then free and through my father's brother-in-law, who was a communist and his mother was even more of a communist, they had contacts and we were able to move into the villa. The villa was a kind of smugglers' den until 1948, because a lot of the Sudeten people from the area - they could only take out twenty or fifty kilos of property then and leave the rest - but they brought everything that was worth anything to the villa where my parents lived, and there was a warehouse in the basement. There was a group of smugglers in Cheb who would then transport the property to Germany, or they would cross the border and return to Cheb with people, take what was theirs, and go back again."