“Our task was to walk in silence and at night to the cross at Ivančena and as soon as we get there, to find the biggest stone we could carry. When we got there, there was a cross standing on the ridge and through the pass you could see Frýdlant that was alight. Nowadays, Ivančena is located on a bare plane but back then it was a wooded area and you didn’t see where you were stepping. We had to follow the sky and the stars that were shining through the treetops. You couldn’t use the torch because that was unacceptable. Not even a complete newcomer would use the torch. When we got there, we learned that the council of the brigade had erected a cross there the previous week.”
“We hated the Hitlurjugend. There was a lot of marching and singing but many of the songs were prohibited. I remember that one of the songs that weren’t prohibited and that you could sing really aloud was ‘Vyhorela stará Turá Brezová’. You could really scream this one. Once we were marching across the bridges in Frýdlant and coming in our direction was a unit of the Hitlerjugend. We immediately started to sing ‘Vyhorela stará Turá Brezová’ as loud as we could. We managed to roar them down and you could really see how they lost their foot pace and got disorganized. Their unit got deformed and that was our greatest moral victory over the Nazis.”
“After the unit was replaced, there stayed behind a lot of ammunition and we even found a revolver and a box of grenades there. We later used to remember, me and Karel Líba, how the five of us were sitting in our club house, next to the glowing fireplace, dismantling the grenades with our bare hands. We would screw it a bit and pass it on to the neighbor. All of a sudden the two halves fell apart and they were held together by a string. We got scared and very carefully screwed it back together and then handed the grenades over.”
“Once I read in the Scout magazine about a Scout brigade from Bohemia that addressed Šrámek to compose a cheer for their brigade. As our region is called Peter Bezruč’s, I wrote a letter to Bezruč asking him if he could invent a cheer for our brigade. Surprisingly, he responded to my letter and he came up with a cheer that went roughly like this: ‘We’re marching ahead like the devils and we’ll slay everyone who gets in our way!’ He added that next time he’d be happy if letters like these were sent to a younger generation of greybeards than he was. We were keeping this historical letter in our chronicle, the chronicle of the Tigers. I had that chronicle at home for many years before I borrowed it in 1968 to a member of our troop who fled to the West. The secret police then sealed off his flat and that’s how we lost our chronicle and with it that historical letter from Bezruč.”
Hugo Mandovský or Píro, as he was known by his Scouting nickname, was born on January 13, 1932. His father was held imprisoned in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Hugo Mandovský got to the Scout movement through the Club of Czechoslovak Tourists, where he was part of an illegal Scout unit. After the end of the war, this unit was converted back into a regular Scout unit where Píro was a leader of the Tigers patrol. The unit erected a tumulus in Ivančena. After he graduated from secondary school in 1948, Mr. Mandovský moved to Prague where he studied at the University of Chemistry and Technology. It was here where he met Dr. Pavel Křivský, who was arrested shortly afterwards . While he was studying at the university, Mr. Mandovský was also actively interested and engaged in choral singing and river touring. After he graduated from university, he worked for the Vítkovice steel works in the chemical works and the blast furnace. He became engaged in the Scout movement again in 1968 and became the leader of a group within the 48th unit of Brownie girls. With the onset of the so-called “Normalization”, his Scout group was carried over to a unit within the Pionýr movement (Pioneer - a Communist youth movement modeled on the Scout movement - note by the translator). They were now a part of the TJ (TJ stands for “tělovýchovná jednota” or gymnastics union) Sokol Ostrava - Nová Ves. In this way, the 48th unit was able to survive till 1989. In 1989 Hugo Mandovský helped to establish the 48th Scout Group Ostrava that he is in charge of. For his lifelong devotion and engagement, he was awarded the Medal of gratitude in 2002 and the golden Medal of St. George in 2007.
