Helmut Haselberger

“There was a guy in Finsterau who was called the ‘Schwarzei’ or ‘Schwarzer’, meaning basically a small black man. It was probably derived from the word ‘Schwirzen’, which means as much as to smuggle in this area. So a Schwirzer basically was a smuggler, because a smuggler had to rub his face all black in order not to shine. So a Schwirzer may be translated as a ‘blacker’, or ‘blackened’. It’s hard to translate to High German but here in Bavaria, it means ‘smuggler’. He apparently had the courage and the knowledge of the spots where you could cross the border. He would, of course, smuggle all sorts of valuables and also news for relatives of people who had fled across the border. However, one day, he was reportedly caught by the border guards and put in jail. He allegedly served 10 years in prison and came back a relatively broken man. He didn’t last for a long time after he came back.”

“That was at a time shortly before we completed elementary school, I mean that school where you had to go to for 8 years. All of us wanted to become a forester. Because it was a profession where you could spend a lot of time in nature, and the foresters had such a wonderful life here. They all had their own house in the woods without actually having to do much in return for it. Everybody else had to build their houses themselves but foresters got a house for free. Me and my cousin Franz, and one or two more, we were in the forest all the time, observing animals like deer and the like. We’d go for trips deep inside the woods, for example, to the Vltava River spring. I mean not directly to the spring, but close-by, to the border, you could even see the spring on the map, how close it was. So we dared to cross and walk in that direction for a few meters but that was more or less it. We weren’t that brave again. We never met anybody there, the place was completely deserted. That was by the end of the fifties.”

“I was sitting in front of the TV. My wife had already gone to bed and our youngest son - he was already at the age when you start to go out. So I was watching a movie; I was still sitting there and our son Peter, who came home then, at a point when I was still sitting in front of the TV, he came come and walked into the living room. I was sitting in the chair besides the table and he pulled out a bottle of beer and put it on the table. He asked me: ‘would you like Czech beer?’ I asked him where the heck he’d gotten Czech beer from. And he said: ‘we were in Kvilda’. I’m sure he said Kvilda. I couldn’t believe my ears. They met some Czech boys at the border who persuaded them to cross the border with them and go to Kvilda. They went there on a moped or something like that. So he went to the Bohemian side of the border and came back with a bottle of Czech beer for me. So that really was one of the first signs for me that the situation was loosening up a little bit and that the border was beginning to open up. Gradually, more and more visitors from the East started arriving at the border.”

“My uncle, who had owned this house here, once took me fishing with him. I believe that my wife interrupted us. He had such a special fishing technique which he used to catch fish hiding underneath stones. Sometimes, a fish hides in a niche and if you’re skillful enough, you can catch it with your hand. When the fish is trapped in a niche from where it is hard for it to escape. So once, me, my uncle and another friend crossed to border to the Bohemian side. On the other side, my uncle walked through a creek with almost no water in it over to the other side and there, he lay down on the ground on his chest and plunged his arm into the water to catch the fish. He didn’t catch anything but suddenly, two Czechoslovak border guards appeared out of nowhere. I was eight years old back then – or somewhere in between eight to ten years, I think. So we were really keen for what was going to happen. But they were very friendly, they spoke German with him and they exchanged cigarettes with my uncle. Of course, for me as a child and for my friend, it was a new experience. Because otherwise, there were virtually no contacts at all, no encounters with people from the other side of the border.”

“I can’t say that we perceived it as a threat. It was something else. We felt like we were living on the edge of the world. The shape of the border reinforced this feeling. You know, you could go down in the direction of southeast and then you had the national park here, but that was it. It was limited to going into and out of Finsterau. That was basically all you could do. There was only one direction there for us. When you were in Freyung, you could also turn towards Austria, maybe also in the direction of Deggendorf or Munich, etc. But here, it was more or less a dead end; we were trapped here in Finsterau. That was, I would say, a very burdensome feeling.”