"We had a three-year-old daughter here. The anatomy is the same everywhere. But we didn't want to leave. On the second trip, my wife said to me, 'You know, you should think about it, look what they're offering you...' I knew how much money I would take, it was 1500 marks at the time. It wasn't much, but we would get an apartment and everything would be fine. But I didn't believe that the Red Cross would arrange to transport our child, it wasn't that easy. And I said, "Yes. And then it'll be Christmas, and you'll be crying by the tree, because we won't be allowed to go home. Our parents will be there alone.' That is what happened to many colleagues who emigrated and couldn't come back. And their parents were getting older, they were sick, and one - two - three of our classmates from Pilsen took care of them, because it was not possible otherwise. It was not easy. And I don't know, well... She still seemed unhappy. And then we were going from Copenhagen to Malmö - a Danish medic gave me these boat tickets to Malmö as a present - and so we went. It was a short journey, forty minutes across the sea, and I was already looking at the churches and cranes in Malmö, and suddenly I had the feeling that there was a strange silence next to me. So I turned around and my wife was crying, 'I want to see Helena'. So we went back and that was it. It's that simple."
"One of my classmates was Slovenian on his mother's side, his father was a professional soldier, and he died soon after the war. His son and his mother continued to visit relatives in Yugoslavia. And this guy started dating a girl. He loved her very much. Her mother was German, a beautiful woman. Her father was originally Czech, I think he was a police officer, and then he was in the government army during the war and after the war he did a trade. And then the State Secret Police started following them. We had two policemen in Kraslice and we knew both of them, there was nothing to hide. The couple knew they were always being watched when dating at Glasberg. I was once interrogated for this in the headmaster's office. They asked me what I knew about it. I didn't say anything. They knew, I told them afterwards. The police invented a theory that a spy centre had been set up in Kraslice because the boy's mother was travelling to Yugoslavia on vacation, and to GDR (Bad Elster) for her joints treatment. And the girl visited her expelled aunt in West Germany. So they believed that the centre worked between the GDR, Yugoslavia, West Germany and Czechoslovakia. It was crazy. But the guy didn't get into the philosophy faculty because of that theory. They didn't take him, even though I was asked by the faculty to write a report on him. And I never wrote a better report in my life. Yet it failed. He studied at the faculty many years later. And strangely enough, the girl got into medicine, she studied with me in Pilsen. So she was okay."
"I spent the end of the war in my native village of Hradecko. I witnessed two red glows in the sky above Pilsen and Dresden when they were bombing them. We also heard a distant continuous thundering for a long time. It was strange, we had never heard anything like that before. Everybody said, 'It's the front thundering.' From a distance the artillery merged into a single tone, a strange, weird tone. Another thing was the condensation lines that we watched in the sky as the bombing raids were passing in different directions. The whole sky was humming. We couldn't even see the planes, they were too high. But the condensation lines were scary too. It was strange. But we still didn't fully understand until one day we were in the field with my grandfather and my mother. We were sowing, so the horse was harnessed to the mowing machine. The sowing took place in the field called Na Vrškách. And a short distance away, about a mile from us, there was a great farm of Hubenov, which once belonged to Metternich. And there were serpentine roads on the main road Pilsen - Žatec, and for many days German military convoys came down there towards the south. Continuously. Everybody was saying, 'They're going over to the Americans, to the south and to Bavaria, etc.' Suddenly five planes appeared and attacked the Germans, so we heard shooting at close range, we heard car explosions. My grandfather pulled the horse out, my mother held it standing in the field. My grandfather took me under his arm and hid me in the field, but I peeked to see it all. And so I watched everything, as they were flying at those German trucks, armoured cars, etc., shooting at them."
Josef Stingl was born on 7 August 1940 in the village of Hradecko in the Pilsen region. His parents lived in the village of Hraničná (Markhausen) near Kraslice in the Ore Mountains until the Munich agreement. His father Josef Stingl Sr. worked as a member of the financial guard. From the front yard of the house he watched the red glow of the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, as well as the red glow of the bombing of Pilsen a few months later. After the war, the family returned to Hraničná. During the next four years they experienced the post-war expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. In 1949, the family, along with the other mostly newly settled inhabitants of Hraničná, were evicted by the state authorities due to the establishment of a border zone between Czechoslovakia and the then German Democratic Republic. The Stingl family moved to neighbouring Kraslice. For several years, Josef watched the disappearance of the Hraničná village. Both parents were convinced communists and at first Josef followed in their footsteps. After finishing secondary school, he moved to Pilsen, where he studied anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University. Thanks to the temporary easing of the regime in the 1960s, he was able to travel to Hamburg in West Germany in 1968 for a work placement, where he also spent 21 August 1968. Despite the opportunity to emigrate, Josef Stingl returned home to his occupied homeland, primarily because of his family. He disagreed with the occupation, and during the years of normalisation, his career opportunities became more difficult. Until 1978 he worked as an assistant professor at the Anatomical Institute of the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University in Pilsen, then he held a similar position in Prague. After the Velvet Revolution he became an associate professor and in 1993 he became the head of the Department of Anatomy at the Third Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. He was still working at the university at the time of the filming (2022).
