Zdeněk Hůrka

"We experienced such an interesting case first hand in September '83' at Babylon when we were serving in the camp. We had this trailer there and our job was to see if any East German citizens tried to cross the border. For us, of course, it was a lucrative service because we were out of the barracks for a week, we got some money when we were older, and we would pick up food in the kitchen. Even a weekend in September some schools came there and we spent it in convivial fun with the girls. In the morning we were woken up by a phone call from the operations officer to see if anyone was missing from the camp. So we didn't know anything, we said wait a minute, we'll try and find out. We went to the reception and we met the receptionist who said that there were three German women crying, saying that their husbands hadn't come back from their trip in the evening, that they had gone to Domažlice and they hadn't come back. So we wrote down their personal data, called the operations officer, and he saw that we must have hit the nail on the head. So a raiding party from Domažlice went out, and they arrived and started to interrogate the women, and since nobody spoke German, they called me in."

"We were called to the border crossing at Folmava, there was a guy there, about thirty years old, long hair, I liked him at first sight. I came there with the interrogator from the military counter-intelligence from Domažlice and now they were asking him where he came from, because he was brought here on the basis of a denunciation by the border guards' assistants, I think from Pec pod Čerchovem. He said that he had come here, he was a Yugoslav, he had worked in Germany, he had come here on holiday and he had used various forms of travel, hitchhiking, taking trains, riding on freight trains and getting lost on the way back. And he asked where the Folmava border crossing was, that was the question that alerted the local border guards. They brought him to the crossing and I arrived there with a military counterintelligence officer, who questioned him, asked him how he got here, what he was doing, where he was working. Then he asked him where he lived. He said the name of a German town and he said, 'There are barracks there.' And he said, 'Yes, I live opposite those barracks.' Now the intelligence officer wanted to know from him what kind of equipment there was, what kind of cars there were, what kind of register plates they had, just unbelievable things. The guy didn't say anything and ended up saying to him, 'Do you ever want to go to Czechoslovakia again?' He said, 'Of course I do.' 'Well, tell me, or you won't come here again.' He then had to promise to monitor these things and that they would meet and that he would give him the information, how that turned out I don't know anymore, of course."