"I got married in 1983 and moved with my wife to Stutenhof and we lived there. Before that I lived in Loosdorf or Vienna. Stutenhof was a beautiful big farmhouse in a beautiful location. An absolutely beautiful place, no other buildings in sight for miles around. You could turn 360 degrees without seeing another building. You don't get much of that nowadays in central Europe on flat land. My wife and I moved in, then Moritz was born in 1983, the first of four children. Before the birth, we were "hippies" and didn't go to the hospital because my wife said she wasn't sick and didn't need the hospital. We had a very good midwife, old Mrs. Sojka who arranged and prepared everything for the birth, which she also attended at Stutenhof. The nearest village was five kilometres away, the nearest hospital was almost 45 minutes away. We were young and Mrs. Sojka handled it well; the doctor did not come. We phoned her, of course by landline as there were no mobile phones or the internet then. The doctor didn't come because she couldn't hear it at night, but Mrs. Sojka was there and she handled it perfectly. I had no idea about giving birth; I was completely lost. It was really an existential shock, if you can call it that, but everything turned out fine. Little Moritz was born and then Mrs. Sojka put a plastic bag in my hand and told me it was the placenta and asked me to get rid of it. So I went out, happy and sleepy, already asleep. It was very early, four o'clock AM on 8 September 1983. I buried the bag as deep as I could so the foxes couldn't get it, and then I had a fit of tears of sheer happiness. Suddenly I looked up at the sky and saw a balloon flying over the border, over Mikulov, in the first rays of the sun. I noticed it flew towards Austria. Fast forward many years into the future. We started growing potatoes in Stutenhof. I needed large wooden crates for storign one thousand kilograms of potatoes, and one Mr. Magušin from Slovakia, near Bratislava, was recommended to me. I called him, he spoke German, not very well but still, and I sent him a fax with drawings of what it should look like, and we agreed on a price and it was done. After a month he called me and said that the boxes were ready and that he would come with two trucks and assemble them on the spot and bolt them together. Then he asked where exactly he was going. I said, 'Stutenhof, but you won't know; I'll explain where it is.' He knew exactly where it was. I thought, 'He knows where the Stutenhof is? Nobody else does!' Then Mr. Magušin appeared and I asked him how come he knew where he was supposed to go. He replied that he had served in the military in Březí for two years. I asked him stupidly what it was like. He replied: 'What do you think? It was horrible, of course. The food was awful and in short supply. It was gross; two years of doing nothing. Drab, disgusting. Except once... but it wasn't that simple. I was on guard duty with a mate and a supervisor, walking the 'signal gas' - the roads in front of the razor wire as seen from the Czech Republic, towards Austria, and the three of us were walking at about four in the morning or so. There was a balloon flying and yes, we were ordered to shoot and we were supposed to shoot at the balloon but we refused.' He said, 'Those Russian rifles aren't working again, fucking rifles! We didn't shoot and we went to military jail for a week.' Then he said it didn't matter if you were in jail or not, it was pretty much the same in the army. I looked at him and I said, 'Oh yeah, that was on 8 September at four o'clock in the morning.' I can still see his jaw hitting the floor. He thought I was a KGB agent. So, both of us saw the balloon from our respective sides."
