Ingrid Leser

"The village Pavlův Studenec lay on the border, it had about 1,700 inhabitants. Because it was so close to the border, it was razed to the ground in the 1950s. I didn't understand that at all as a child. Why are houses destroyed? Why do the bulldozers destroy them? Many people who lived in Bärnau came from Pavlův Studenec. So, they said to each other: 'Today they are demolishing your house.' It was terrible and terrifying: why are they demolishing houses where Germans used to live? As a six-year-old child, I couldn't understand it.'

"I came to Bärnau with my parents in 1955 and started attending a school there. In 1956, my grandparents also moved to live with us. My grandfather was a farmer at home and it was important for him not to go to work in a factory, but to run his own small farm. He often talked about what it was like at home. Bärnau is on the border, his fields were on the border, we often went there and he said: 'Look, if we went that way for three hours, we would be home.' Home, how is home? We were still living on the border and it sounded like a fairy tale to me. Home… so why am I here? Why is there a line that cannot be crossed, why would they shoot immediately? Are there bad people? Where is the problem? So, a man lived on the frontier and knew that when one went into the forest to gather fruit, one had to be careful, be careful, be careful. Oh well."