Tomáš Schreier

* 1948

Illegal border crossing, New citizen of Sudetenland after 1945, Svědci lokálních událostí z éry komunismu
21. 8. 1968 - Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops
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    Cross-border 'Freundschaft' between Czechoslovakia and the GDR

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    duration: 01:24
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    "Since we had relatives in Zittau, I went there once and met guys who climbed like we did in the Hrádek area. We struck up a sort of 'Freundschaft' with them and we helped each other out. When they needed something from Bohemia, sports stuff and so on such as skis or ski boots, they could buy it but were not allowed to bring it back home. That was forbidden. So, they brought it to me, I stored it, and we agreed that I'd bring it to the border at such and such time. Then we brought it to them and they took it. In turn, when we needed a bicycle, they could get their Diamant bikes, so the quid pro quo was that they got it for us. Or a friend needed a telephoto lens or a camera. In short, it was a kind of barter, so to speak."

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    Border crossing in Varnsdorf closed because of Ulbricht's cartoon

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    "The border crossing in Varnsdorf got closed at the time. When the Warsaw pact armies arrived, some guys stuffed a goat or painted a goat and wrote 'Walter Ulbricht' on it. He used to have this goatee and this weird voice, abd they likened him to a goat. Somehow, that offended them East German comrades. They closed the crossing, so we couldn't go via Varnsdorf and had to go via Poland, to Frýdlant and Habartice and then back to Zittau via Poland. That was quite a bit farther than going via Varnsdorf. It lasted for a while, but then they opened it back so you could use that crossing again."

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    Czechs returning from abroad "back to their homeland"

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    "I was born in Zittau in January 1948. My father originally came from Mladá Boleslav but he and my grandfather, his father, moved to Varnsdorf and then to Zittau. My father was born in 1904, so it must have been around that time. He married a German wife from a village past Zittau. My sister was born first, she's two years older, and then it was my turn. When there was this sort of 'vacuum' in the Sudetenland after the deportation of the German population, President Beneš issued a declaration inviting Czechs living abroad to return to their homeland. They were promised dwellings and jobs and so on. That was in 1949. So my dad decided to go to the Czech Republic. They went to Hrádek because he knew the place; they used to go from Zittau to Bohemia for beer and so on. We moved to Hrádek and lived in Hrádek from 1949 on. There were a lot of Czech émigrés because there were mixed marriages at the border and there were a lot of Czechs in Zittau too. They also moved to Hrádek."

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    Liberec, 05.12.2023

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Smuggling? That’s just a pejorative term for exchanging goods

Tomáš Schreier with a friend before a climbing trip
Tomáš Schreier with a friend before a climbing trip
photo: Witness
photo: Witness
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Tomáš Schreier comes from a mixed Czech-German marriage. He was born in Zittau, Germany on 26 January 1948. One year after his birth the family moved to the vacated borderland, specifically to Hrádek nad Nisou where the Czechoslovak government offered them a dwelling and a job. Tomáš grew up in the immediate vicinity of the barbed wire and the heavily guarded border that separated Czechoslovakia from the GDR until 1963. From that year onwards, he would visit Germany regularly, both legally via crossings and illegally across the ‘green border’. An avid mountaineer, he maintained contacts with German mountaineers. In addition to sports meetings on Czech and German rocks, they also smuggled goods across the border in both directions. However, this was just help on a case-by-case basis. On 21 August 1968, Tomáš Schreier was serving with the military in Komárno, Slovakia where he witnessed the arrival of the “brotherly” Hungarian army to occupy Czechoslovakia across the Komárno Bridge. As a successful athlete with contacts abroad, excellent knowledge of German and a passion for travel, Tomáš Schreier was an ideal candidate for cooperation from the point of view of the State Security Service (StB). For the sake of bein allowed to travel to the West, he initially agreed to collaborate, but according to his statements as well as actual records on file, he did not actually deliver and the collaboration was soon discontinued. Tomáš Schreier welcomed and supported the changes in 1989 and still stands by this attitude. At the time of filming in 2024, he was living in Hrádek nad Nisou.

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