- by Jitka Kranz
All my life I had the opportunity to travel wherever I wanted and when I wanted. Being an Austrian citizen and living in a Schengen country gives me the privilege to travel freely to most countries in the world without obtaining a visa and travel within the EU Schengen countries without even carrying my passport. Having friends from all over the world I am well aware of my privilege knowing that not everybody is so lucky to be able to travel as freely as I am. Even though some of my friends faced great difficulties travelling because they lived in Afghanistan or the Gaza strip, we eventually all came together in the end and met at international schools, conferences and events. Unfortunately, now, and even though we all know that this crisis is not going to last forever, this state, atmosphere and mostly the freedom we had is put on hold. Once again, I would like to stress that this should not sound like a hopeless call for help in the dark, it is merely the acknowledgment and some observations of the current events.
As I already mentioned, I grew up in countries that enabled me to travel as I wished but not so long ago in the place I was born the situation looked very different. I was born on March 19th, 1998 in Brno, in the Czech Republic, only nine years after the Iron Curtain fell. With the fall of the Iron Curtain an episode in the Czech history ended. An episode of 41 years of a single party regime with severe human rights restrictions such as the restriction of free speech, and a strict travel ban to western countries as well as a partial ban to travel to other Warsaw Pact countries or the Soviet Union. My mother was born into that environment, into that regime. Twice as a child she had the opportunity to travel to Bulgaria to visit the Black Sea. Any travel of such a kind had a long procedure to antecede which included a detailed and meticulous check of the person's personal life, a permission of the working place as well as school and a check of the extended family and connections abroad. Once all of that was successfully completed one could feel very lucky to have the opportunity to travel. At that time, it was completely normal for my mother and her friends to be locked in a relatively small part of the world with little perspectives to leave.
Thinking of my situation the picture could not be more different. As I said I was born in the Czech Republic. When I was eight years old my family moved to Austria as my dad is Austrian. During my early childhood and teenage life, I travelled big parts of Europe, age 18 I moved to Italy to attend an international high school and during the following gap-year I attended Semester at Sea, a study abroad program which visited eleven countries on four continents and now I am studying at an international university in Germany. I do have to admit that my life journey as well as the range and scale of my international friends is rather exceptional even for my generation, nonetheless I feel that the general public in Europe at least has many more international connections as well experiences in foreign countries than the older generation had. Perhaps that is the reason why some people of the younger generation feel a little uprooted in such exceptional times such as these. It is almost ironic that even though I am at home now, the vast majority of my friends are far away and almost all if not all of our plans to meet in the near future are either cancelled or very uncertain. Some of the older generations that have experienced closed national borders seem to be differently affected by the current situation than us.
We have decided to interview some of our relatives and family friends to get their perspective on the current situation of closed borders and the special circumstances and also to get a glimpse of the kind of environment that they lived and grew up in. Three out of our interviewees grew up in East Germany and one in Poland. We are well aware of the fact that the situation might have been very different in other countries of the Eastern Block and we do not want to generalize our interviewees experiences. The aim of this article is to give a perspective to the younger generation that feel severely restricted nowadays and perhaps make us all appreciate a little more how much freedom we enjoy on a daily basis under normal circumstances.
Beate grew up in the DDR, in Rostock. She lived with her parents and siblings in a very small apartment, “I do not know how we did it back then”, she says. During the weekends they traveled to their grandparents house in the countryside. As traveling was severely restricted in countries such as East Germany, in-country tourism was very common. Beate remembers: “As long as I was little I did not travel abroad. We spent our holidays in the apartments of my aunts and uncles in Potsdam or Plauen and in return they spent their holidays in our apartment in Rostock by the Baltic Sea. Sometimes my grandma made day trips with us to Stettin.” Summer camps were very common in the Eastern Block and a welcomed way to entertain your children during the long summer breaks when parents had to work. Korinna, born in Eastern Germany, remembers enjoying such camps particularly. “There were family camps, if you will, where the parents sent their kids to hostels, and they would carry out programs, play sports and so on. I would spend at least 3 weeks a summer there, it was so much fun for me to hang out with the other children.”
As already mentioned, travelling to other countries was very difficult. “Traveling was a privilege and not a right. One could not just take the train and cross the border.” All of our interviewees had the opportunity to travel at some point, however compared to the scale of traveling that we have seen in the last 10 or 15 years, we could certainly say that travelling was very different back then. “In 1985 I went with my family to the Czech Republic. And once I travelled with my siblings to Hungary, that must have been around 1988. But we did not travel around the countries. You had a fixed place, where you had to stay and I believe we even had something called “Meldepflicht”, mandatory registration”, says Beate.
Pawel was able to travel to West Germany, which at that time was a big exception. However he does remember how strenuous and difficult it was to get all the permissions and documents needed. “It was laborious to get the approval for the voyage. The family had to write me a guarantee which had to be certified by the Polish consulate. Once I received it, I had to go to the police to apply for the approval to go and when they approved the journey, I had to borrow my passport.” In Poland at that time one did not have their passport at home, they were all kept with the local authorities and could be only borrowed for a good reason with a special permission.
Beate was fortunate not to face any discrimination while traveling abroad. “[ ] The people could not distinguish between us and the west-Germans. And the people from West Germany, had quite a good reputation because of their money.” Pawel, who grew up in Poland faced some discrimination, however it was rather moderate. “You just heared some stupid jokes, which are based on prejudices: “Do you want to have a holiday in Poland, your car is already there”. But those jokes exist about every nation.” Korina, remembers a different kind of disscrimination. Discrimination of the local people that could be perhaps better described as the outstanding privillages of view individuals. “We only sometimes had problems with the Russian military wives, but that wasn’t a huge deal. We would just be angry at them because they would buy the special or rare products before we had a chance.”
We have asked our interviewees how they perceive the restrictions in times of Corona and if they think that people who have learned to live with restrictions from an early age perhaps cope with them in a better way. According to Pawel it is the case. “As children in socialism we learnt that freedom is the insight for the necessary. We were taught that certain restrictions are useful. Unlimited Freedom is chaos. Obviously, it was meant differently then than it is now, but I think it makes it easier to accept the restrictions.” Also Inge is convinced that her childhood as well as adulthood contributed to her acceptance towards the current crisis. “Definitely. The mentality is a different one. We learned to live and cope with restrictions. I think it is easier for me to accept those restrictions. In the end they aren't the first restrictions I have to endure in my life.”
In this spirit I would like to invite the young generations to look up and be patient, as we know that this crisis will find an end, sooner or later. Let's try to be positive, empathetic and helpful so we all get through this in a bearable way, and can enjoy what will come after it.
If you wish to read the full interviews, you can find them in a separate tab on our blog!
Have a wonderful week <3
