Lumír Čermák

* 1923

  • “It wasn’t that bad but after a while Tonda came holding a package wrapped in newspaper under his arm. I asked him what it was. He said it was a ‘head’ but I understood ‘coffee’ instead. I wondered if he was burglarizing apartments while there were people dying around us. ‘Why do you think that I’m burglarizing apartments?’ ‘But you said that it was coffee!’ ‘No coffee, a head. Look!’ He unwrapped the paper and there was one half of a skull with a brain in the package. That’s when I started smoking.”

  • “At that camp I sought to get the nickname Unkas. At home, I read the book ‘Last of the Mohicans’ and it was literally torn to pieces because my older brothers had both read it as well. But the boys said that I can’t be Unkas. I wasn’t Unkas to them. But they noticed that I liked to sing all the time, so they said that I’d be Kanár.”

  • “There’s a very uncomfortable experience that I recall. It was at the time of the great air raid on Ostrava in 1944. I was a member of the garrison in Slezská Ostrava. Our commander was a German, his name was Holzmann. We had our garrison in Slezská Ostrava in the inn. At one point during the raid, our commander Holzmann stood in the door, holding a helmet in one hand and a peaked cap in the other. He was apparently confused and didn’t know which one to put on at that moment. He ordered me to run to the shelter. On the inn floor, underneath the bench, lay the sapper Vodička, an engine driver of old Austria-Hungary. He was praying there.”

  • “It is true that I used to be a member of the Communist Party and I’ve never tried to hide it. I became a party member because I thought that this was the party that strived to come to the help of the poor and the miserable. Later, I found out that it actually wasn’t as easy and clear-cut as I had thought.”

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    Ostrava, 17.04.2012

    (audio)
    duration: 04:04:35
    media recorded in project A Century of Boy Scouts
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My message to the Scouts is: Stay Clean!

Graduation picture of Lumír Čermák from May 1943
Graduation picture of Lumír Čermák from May 1943
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Ing. Lumír Čermák, by his Scout nickname Kanár (Canary), was born on August 24, 1923, in Orlová. His father worked as a bureaucrat in the black-coal mines in Orlová-Lazy. Lumír Čermák had two brothers. His brother Květoň became a professor at the University of Technology in Brno and became occupied with forestry. Lumír Čermák originates in a Sokol family but in 1934, he also joined the Scouts in Orlová. He gradually became fully consumed by Scouting. In 1937, he became a mentor of the chamois troop. Before Munich, Kanár joined the civil air defense. After the annexation of Těšínsko by the Poles in October 1938, Mr. Čermák’s family was spared the usual fate of forced deportation, because his father was indispensable to the Poles as he knew perfectly the map archives of all the coal mines of Orlová-Lazy. During the Polish occupation of Těšínsko, Kanár refused to attend the Polish grammar school and was posted to the OPL - Obrona przeciwlotnicza. After the occupation of Těšínsko by the Germans, Lumír Čermák studied at a grammar school for refugees in Ostrava-Přívoz and for a short time became a member of an illegal scout troop operating under the umbrella of the Czech Tourist Club (KČT). After his graduation in 1943, he was called to service in the anti-aircraft police unit in Ostrava and the paramedics. He witnessed the liberation of Orlová in which he actively participated himself. After the liberation, he briefly served in the national security guard. After the war, he founded a Scout Center in Orlová and his future wife Jiřina helped him by leading the girl troops. He began his studies at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague (ČVUT) with a focus on water management. In 1947, he joined the Communist Party, from which he was expelled in 1970. After the third renewal of the Scout, Kanár became the secretary of the ORJ Ostrava. His research is dedicated to the Silesian revolt and the story of Ivančena. In 1999, he was finally admitted to the honorary Svojsík troop, the Silesian entourage of Petr Bezruč.