The school still owes me an answer to the question of why there has to be a barbed wire border between our two socialist countries
Monika Simchen was born in Ebersbach, Saxony on 28 April 1949, less than four years after the end of the Second World War. She grew up literally metres from the Czech border and within sight of Jiříkov. Both her parents and grandparents were deported from the town after the Second World War. As a child, Monika watched the new settlers of Jiříkov demolishing her mother’s native house. Her childhood was marked by the presence of an impenetrable barbed wire fence that separated the then Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the German Democratic Republic until 1963. Monika visited her parents’ homeland for the first time in 1966, and since then she has maintained contact with the last surviving Germans in Jiříkov, singing in the local church choir. In 1968, tanks of the occupying “brotherly” armies rolled across the border into Liberec and Prague. In 1970 she married Gerhard Simchen, a descendant of German emigrants from Bohemia. After 1989 Monika Simchen found partners in private business in the Czech border region - she ran a textile workshop. Today, the witness hardly notices the border between Jiříkov and Ebersbach, but she can still describe with absolute accuracy where the barbed wire used to run.