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5: CASE STUDY 2: THE CZECH/AUSTRIAN BORDER
The western section of this southern building was used for official purposes
as offices, communications rooms and for admin purposes. Some of the
rooms are likely to have been used as archives. Seeing the vast amounts of
papers generated by the border guard at the Military archive in Brno,
storage must have been required for at least some of these reports,
something that is easily forgotten in today’s digital world. Little evidence
survives here to be able to give us an indication of exactly what the different
rooms were used for. Between the official and the kitchen areas a communal
room was located where official meetings were held. A square hole in the
wall and the mountings for a projector in the adjacent room indicates that
films were shown here (Figure 84–85). When I enter this room with my
guide he refers to it as a ‘Propaganda room’ as if it was obvious there would
be one of those. He explains how most official places and institutions had
these types of rooms to show communist propaganda, or ‘political
schooling’ as the official term was (David 2010 pers. comm. 13 th October).
Figure 85: Mounts for a projector
in room adjacent to ‘propaganda
room’ at Hájenka border guard
station.
Photo: Anna McWilliams 2011.
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