Balloons of freedom

Oldřich Kalousek served as a border guard in Šumava from October 1953 to January 1956. He was in the so-called “first-wave” company tasked with guarding the defensive and restricted zones established in the border area. “The border guards were not there to shoot people as if they were rabbits, but to defend the area from intruders”, says Oldřich Kalousek. Any violation within the zone was treated as a special incident. One of the circumstances recalled by Kalousek was the monitoring and subsequent elimination of balloons carrying propaganda leaflets above Plešné jezero Lake. The hot-air balloons released in Germany with attached leaflets were supposed to carry their load above the border zone and then drop it. The leaflets were prepared by the press department of Radio Free Europe with the aim of providing unbiased information from abroad, and were supposed to disrupt the totalitarian monopoly of the press. Oldřich Kalousek is one of the few living witnesses who remembers the balloons of freedom: “There were perhaps as many as thousands of these balloons. Each one had a box attached to it that contained the flyers. It wasn’t possible to shoot them down with an ordinary rifle but one lad brought a machine gun and took them down in a quick fashion. We then used the fabric they were made of for everything - as tablecloths on the tables or as covers for the notice boards in the Julius Fučík corner.”