Monika Simchen

* 1949

  • "Actually, the border has always influenced my life. We lived right on the border. There was a barbed wire fence between Ebersbach and Jiříkov. As a schoolgirl, I often walked past it; it must have been at least two metres high, if not more. We grew up with this barbed wire. You could hardly see people there, nobody was allowed to meet at the border. Even if you knew someone there, you weren't allowed to talk to them. There were always patrols at the border, and it was very strictly guarded. My paternal grandmother got caught once when she was in the woods for mushrooms. She went maybe three, four, five meters into Czech territory, they took her away and she had to go to the office in Rumburk and explain at the interrogation why she had crossed the border. That upset her terribly at the time. I once asked her at school why. Actually, we were both socialist countries then, the GDR and Czechoslovakia, so why did there have to be this huge barbed wire fence between our two countries? The teacher didn't know the answer then, and they still owe me the answer to this question."

  • "When I was a little girl, I was probably not even in school, we went to the Heinberg hill to see... Actually, we were not allowed to go there because the border was guarded. If we had been caught, I don't know what would have happened. Anyway, my parents found out that my mother's parents' house in the lower village was being demolished. Then people who had come from far away, from inland Bohemia or Moravia, were resettled here in Jiříkov, in the Czech borderland. It was a large house, built of stone in the front and, I still vaguely remember, half-timbered in the back. The half-timbered part was demolished, they just burnt it down. The whole family was there, and we were standing up there looking down, and the adults were all crying. Then I guess people took apart the stones that were left, and then later when we went by, there was still a very large blue spruce tree standing in front of the house for a long time, and the cornerstone from the stairs. It was a big stone, and it disappeared at some point too. It was there for a long time. I always knew that's where the house stood."

  • "I only know about it from my parents' account. The war ended in '45 and people were actually living in their houses quite normally. My father came back from the front in the autumn of 1945 and stayed home. Then, I think it was connected with the Beneš decrees, the Germans were driven out of their homes. My father always told me that he stayed with a friend for about six months in the lower part of the village where all those who had to leave their homes gathered. There must have been at least twenty or twenty-five people living there before the order came that the Germans were to be moved directly to Germany. Then the trains came. They didn't even know where the trains were going, they were told to meet at the station in an hour or two. They were allowed to take eight kilos with them. Eight kilos is not much. I tried it on the scale once, it's not much. And then they left, somewhere abroad."

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    Zittau, 14.02.2024

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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, Zittau, 2024
Monika Simchen, Zittau, 2024
photo: Video shoot

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.