Zdeněk Žampa

„The club was lead by a border patrol officer who was doing his compulsory army service and for him, it meant extra points which led to more leaves or other advantages. This way, I got to Maříž for the first time because Maříž was in the no access area because the wires were right behind the village. In 1976, they shofted the wires forward so Maříž was entirely behind the wires. But in the 1960, local people had no reason to go to Maříž because it was in the no access area, there was only a cow farm and pig farm and only people who cared for it went there. So I was in Maříž on an outing with the Youth Border Patrol, at the time when the torso of the Maříž castle still stood. The castle had been abandoned by then, though. I remember that there still were parquet floors and that we wandered through the emtpy rooms. And then we got to the castle chapel where there were those coloured windows with glass joined by lead strips. And we, the Youth Border Patrol, used stones to break those coloured bits of glass and then we picked the bits of lead outside and during Christmas, we poured lead for good luck. So that it would show us god omens. I thus have a debt for damaging the castle chapel. Then the bolsheviks tore the castle down to reuse the bricks. We spread a gossip that the castle was dynamited for some filming but that’s a nonsense, they wouldn’t let any film crew there. But the gossip spread and it’s being repeated and sometimes it gets published in some book. We like legends here. The truth is, they tore the castle down and took it apart to reuse the bricks and several houses are built from those bricks. I would show you a street… Lebedev Street or General Svoboda Street. What lovely street names are those.”

„There was this long-standing habit that one picked a grave. Even with a wonderful granite gravestone, even made from that black Swedish granite. And on the top of the German names on that grave, one would attach such a table with screws, it was made in bakelite or black glass and on that, othernames were written and that was it, a done deal. When my grandmother died in about 1973, we picked a grave like this. I remember that our family picked one such grave and that there was an inscription on the grave. And I remember that the inscription was covered by a black board with an inscription that said The Vidlák and Žampa families, because grandma and grandpa’s surname was Vidlák. That’s what I knew. And when my mom died in 2010, I was the youngest son so it was my job to deal with it so I located the grave, I found the dates of births and deaths in the registries to get it right, of my dad, grandma, grandpa and mom and I had it incised in the stone plinth of the gravestone. Mr. Dvořák, a stonemason from Telč, came and I told him: ‘Unscrew that board.’ He removed the screws and the board and asked, ‘so, Mr. Žampa, do I grind it off?’ And I said: ‘No, clean it and put silver foil on the inscription!’ He looked at me as if I grew a second head because it’s a bit unusual, or it was unusual. But I think that my parents don’t really mind. The same way we occupied the house we now live there [in the grave] with Wenzel Růžička who died sometime in 1939, and his wife. And I am glad about it whenever I go to see the grave. That they rest there in peace, in Europe.”

„The rail tracks were torn out only at the very border, only a few metres, because in 1957, there was this idea that at least cargo trains could be allowed to Austria again. So they fixed the ballast and they left out about thirty metres of the tracks just at the border. The tracks stayed there until the latest time in 1989. Overgrown with weeds but there were still tracks going from the Slavonice station. But all that was behind the wires. As I had said, there were bands of kids, so we were growing up there, we had bikes that we had inherited from the Germans, and we used to ride the bikes a bit more. Then we played in such a wood which was past the town walls and the abattoir, at the end of a stream off the town limits. That was past the signs that read No Entry. But we were local boys, we would build forts there, but it was past the signs, normal people were not allowed there. I have this beautiful memory. It was in winter, we were wearing sweatpants and fur hats and those half-rubber boots, they were called ski boots. Suddenly, a flock of quails appeared and we started to chase them in a bout of hunting fervour. There were five of us boys, we spread wide and tried to hunt for the quails in the field. We were high on thathunting mood and so we got close to the so=called small wires. There were killing wires at the border and in front of them, the small wires, without electricity. Like in Mauthausen. In Auschwitz. In that hunting fervour, we thought we would chase the quails into the wires and then we would be able to pick them. A bunch of silly boys we were… When we were near the wires, the quails just waved their wings and flew away. In the very moment, a jeep came and some gun-wielding asshole, a lieutenant. came to arrest us. We were reprimanded at school for trespassing in the border area, we the hunters. What strange times those were...”

„It’s true that I invited the Sklep crew, and at that time, I’d been playing and singing and showing off in that theatre, I invited them to Barchan in 1987. During the fomenting times of socialism, that Barchan in Jemnice, it was such a weird feast where all passages, all halls were open until dawn. It was a weird celebration of freedom in that stale time. Only from Friday till Saturday and till Sunday, simply, just for a weekend, a big drunken crawl. So I invited the Sklep crew, we partied hard as one is supposed to do during the Barchan, we howled songs and toasted to death of Communism because we wer unstoppable. And then we went to Slavonice and we lived in that house, my birth house. And next door, there was an empty dilapidated house which had its own history. A Jewish lady had lived there before, one of those who had stazed. Her husband had somehow stayed in Austria and he gave the bolsheviks two or three years, that after [they fail], he would return, and they stayed for forty years. This way the house remained in priavate hands. Mrs. Zimmer had already died, her grandson and her daughter were still alive, it belonged to them, but they did not care for the house. It had been abandoned for ten or fifteen years and sgrafitti from 1547 were falling off the façade. I borrowed the keys from Mr. Kostroun who belonged to that family and we entered the house. There were trees growing in the yard, it was owergrown so much with bushes that one couldn’t get into the barn. A rococo ceiling was peeling off inside, we wandered there as if out of our minds, I had not seen the inside for years either. And right away, we got this idea that something needs to be done, that we would fix the house.”