Cyril Hauptmann

"Then, when the Club of Friends of the City of Kadaň was founded, and I'll come back to that, we drew a lot from what I had been through as a boy. And the Friends of Kadaň and the children's tourist club Hraničář, that's how it started, we used to meet as a club at Mr. Iša on the square, I think that's number 74. Karel Iša, there's also Kiša here, so that it doesn't sound... So Karel Iša and that's where we agreed to meet. He found out that there was a Club of Friends of Karlovy Vary and he met somebody there - they gave him their statutes. And he threw it into a kind of a Kadaň information leaflet that came out once a month, which had the main city programme, plus what was in the cinemas, if there was going to be any theatre, who was born when, who died, who got married. It was a little gossip column. So he put it in there, and then at that suggestion, we met at Mr. Iša's house, according to the date it said. And we agreed that we would be interested in starting a civic association. The aim would be to be interested in the history and the present and also in the future of Kadaň, in the preservation of monuments. The preservation of monuments - by that we mean not destroying any monuments, because Kadaň was terribly run down. In the 1960s it was one of the ugliest towns in the region. It was being put back together, and with such building enthusiasm - to fix something up again, to put it back together - you had to keep an eye on it so that it didn't do more harm than good. That is, the houses on the outside remained as the historical value had for years. And for the sake of improving the look of Kadaň - so that Kadaň wouldn't get damaged. That's what makes Kadaň one of the most beautiful historical centres - that square and those streets around it. You can always see it when people come to the Emperor's Day in Kadaň, which is one of the biggest events in Kadaň. So it always makes me happy when guys from these different historical groups - amateur artists and other friends who come here say, 'God, how do you do it in Kadaň? Every year you see something going on here, and it's dead as a doornail at our town.' I guess it's thanks to all the people, starting with the mayor and the people of Kadaň, that they're trying to make Kadaň look the way it does."

"There was such a sadness from the people who were in the club during that year's activity. So it was: 'You guys are doing great! Here you all are reminiscing about what it was like to live here and you're going to go and see it. But we lived in the Doupov region, that's a military area and there's no chance to get there. We would like to go there. We came there after the war, when they drove the Germans out. We came there, we settled it and in the fifties the soldiers drove us out and we haven't been there since, we don't know what it's like, what it's like there.' Well, so I kind of promised to try and find out. Fortunately, I managed to meet Zdeněk Holý in the barracks in Radošov, who was then the commander of the supply at Doupov, a soldier by profession. And he told me what I should do, that I had to go to Karlovy Vary to the military base. There they would give me information about the conditions under which I could take a bus of people there, about 40 or 45 people. And that we would go to see the Doupov region. So I did that and we got permission. There had to be a route written out, where we were going, who was responsible, and we got a military escort in a Gaz 69. Almost 40 years later we went there again with the Doupov inhabitants. That was probably the most beautiful and profound experience, because those people really... Of course, the town of Doupov had already been razed to the ground. You were there with me. So you know that somewhere, here and there you can see that there was a house there, there's a remnant of some well, fruit trees. And by those fruit trees, people knew where their house was. Then they'd break off a branch from a plum tree or an apple tree. And big tears: 'My dad planted this here.' So this Doupov region, this meeting of the vanished villages of Doupov with this trip, that was probably the thing that appealed to me the most and I'm very proud of."