The disappearance of a border guard

“If I had to enroll in the army once more and had the choice, I would go there again. The environment there was nice and we had a good team spirit in our unit,” says Josef Kadlčík, who joined the border guard in the late 1950s. He was a member of the border guard company in Horní Hraničná nearby Cheb. He depicts his service as a quiet time with only a small number of incidents, like, for example, the disappearance of private Resutík. One evening, Resutík took advantage of an opportunity, being the commander of a patrol of two soldiers on a watch tower called “Špačkárna.” He was guarding a designated stretch of the border with a new recruit, “freshman” Kříž. Under the pretext of taking a drink and going to the toilet in a nearby latrine, he climbed down from the watch tower, went through a passage underneath the border barricades and walked away to Germany under the veil of darkness. The inexperienced novice Kříž didn’t know the terrain well. He even didn’t know exactly which way the border was running and thus the departure of his superior didn’t strike him as suspicious. He waited for Resutík for over an hour. After the arrival of a patrol that was taking care of the wire entanglements, it was already clear what had happened. Private Resutík fled with full gear and arms to Germany. When the newbie Kříž realized what had happened, he was paralyzed by the shock and had to be carried down from the tower. Josef Kadlčík today sees the incident in the following way: “We uniformly hated Resutík when he did that. At that time, if we had caught him, we’d give him a terrible beating just because of that poor newbie.”