My aunts and uncles disappeared without a trace
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Josef Černík was born on November 28, 1938, in Prague as the fifth and second-to-last child in a mixed marriage. His father, František Černík, was a self-employed businessman who joined the Communist Party after World War I. His mother, Anna Schnarrer, came from a large German family in Velký Šluknov. In 1937, she renounced her German nationality. The Černík family lived in Prague and survived the war unscathed. His grandmother, Therese Schnarrer, a widow, was not expelled following the intervention. His mother’s siblings, who had been expelled, vanished without a trace. It is not known what became of them. The Černíks bought a cottage in Lipová near Šluknov. After her death in 1946, all of Grandmother’s meager possessions were confiscated by the state, which refused to sell them to the family. In 1948, the Černíks began to suffer from poverty, so they sent Josef to live with his sister Anna, who was eighteen years older, in Liščí (near Lipová u Šluknova). He remained there until he completed his apprenticeship as a boilermaker. He was unable to pursue higher education primarily because his father had left the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1950 following the execution of Milada Horáková. The witness worked in construction to secure an apartment. He married in 1968, and his daughter Veronika was born five years later. In 1990, he married for the second time. In his recollections, the opening of the borders in the 1990s is associated primarily with cottage burglaries and car thefts in Germany. He also has unpleasant memories from that time of the treatment of refugees fleeing the war in the former Yugoslavia. Josef Černík retired in 1999. Since then, he has spent most of the year in Lipová near Šluknov and the winter in Prague, where he had his permanent residence even at the time of filming (2025).
