Tomáš Rimpel

"Not once was a firearm used in our company during the two years I was there. That was absolutely the last thing. On the other hand, when you have someone there in front of you who has already overcome those wire roadblocks and is running away. What happens in that border guard's head is, if I stop him, I get a ticket, if he runs away, I go to jail. And if it's 200 yards in front of him, there's no choice but a machine gun. Everyone can't resist that. Especially the political training. The border company had three platoons, two companies are serving, and one company has political training. There's a senior officer in each company, a political officer, and he's beating the crap out of them, and the political training was twice a week. How terrible the West is, how they can hurt us, how we are the only ones who can stop it. On the third time, one platoon had a border left. Not everyone got a walkout. Only about ten people got a walkout. Just to Krásná to the pub, it was seven kilometres on a gravel road."

"There was a big reward for being detained. Luckily we didn't massacre anyone. I wasn't there even once. But I drove them around afterwards. That was an immediate alarm to the field, I had a gazik (jeep). Jump in the car, we knew where it was, the alarms showed it, there were phones everywhere. Every soldier had this "frog" with which he could tap, it was called a well. It was made of concrete, there was a cable, a socket. That's how we communicated with the company, with the officers who were on duty. When there was an arrest, that's when I went along, it was mostly East Germans. We treated them pretty well, they were mostly soaked, and hungry, and they were there for two or three days watching the border. They were given food, we lent them sweatpants while their clothes dried in the boiler room. Then the "contras" came from Cheb, or even from Prague if it was more difficult, and did the interrogations. Then we took them back to Germany. There was the first East German border company at Tripoint. There we handed them over to the East German border guards, they were bastards. They shouted at them, hit them on the back with their rifle butts and treated them like crazy criminals. These were often families with children."