When I went to the first grade, I only knew German
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Antonín Missberger was born on November 28, 1945 in Horní Maršov in the eastern Giant Mountains. He comes from a branched family of Missbergers - Sudeten Germans who settled in the Giant Mountains already in the second half of the 17th century. His father worked as a factory worker in the local paper mills and the family farmed at the same time. After 1945, a large part of his relatives were removed from Czechoslovakia on the basis of the Beneš decrees. The family of the witness was able to stay in Maršov thanks to his father’s job. But with the advent of communism, they lost a large part of their economy. Antonín started going to the first grade of a Czech school at the age of 5. Like his siblings, he could only speak German, so he quickly had to learn Czech. He then graduated from the Mechanical Engineering School in Nové Město nad Metují and then from the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he also experienced the August occupation in 1968. After school, he started working as a technician at the Industrial Automation Factory (ZPA) Trutnov, and from 1989 he operated together with his brother Josef in his native Maršov the saw that they sold in 2008. After the revolution, thanks to restitution, his family regained the confiscated property. He and his wife Maria raised two children. At the time of filming in 2022, Antonín Missberger lived in Trutnov.
