Josef Švehla

"It was normal at the border. We were calm there. The border could have been breached from the outside, if someone from Austria wanted to come here. Apparently there were few such candidates to want to walk through the barbed wire and wire barricade, which was usually electrified at night. Then there was the danger of intrusion internally, as from our side, which was mostly people from our side or it was those who didn't want to be here and couldn't get in by the normal route. But they were more likely to be people from foreign nations or foreign countries. Specifically in our area it was citizens of Poland. We usually checked them already at the railway station in Slavonice. If they did not have the necessary documents, we handed them over to the police and they took them away, questioned them, gave them fines, or got them out of our territory again. So we had, who knows if two or three such detentions in the year I was there. As border guards there, we had better pay, better military pay than those who were serving in the interior and maybe near the border. Let me give you an example: Jemnice, that's near Moravské Budějovice. Or Hodonín and so on. I had the opportunity to go through this whole area on the border with Austria, from the number one unit, which was Slavonice, to the Russian houses, which was the last unit on the border with Slovakia, and carry out the so-called demarcation, the control of border landmarks. To see if someone was moving it towards us or the other side."