Jaroslav Novák

“He applied for the Expo 67 in Montreal at that time. I was telling him: ‘Bro, don’t be crazy, don’t you even think of staying there!’ – ‘No, no way!’ – ‘Really, I mean it, brother...’ He says: ‘No, no kidding…’ Obviously, he did remain there. With a twenty-kilogram suitcase and ten dollars which he had illegally bought from somebody here, he went for the Expo 67. In the first letter that we received from him he wrote: ‘My dear mom and dad.’ What he wrote sounded very reasonable, he must have had it already prepared and thought out… ‘I am not staying here in exile out of my own will... and he stated the reason for that, he mentioned his employer. He wrote names of three people who had wronged him: ‘I filed a criminal complaint against them, together with a request that they write such personal assessment on me which would correspond to reality. Objective and just, not a dishonest one, so that I would be able to live as a human and not as a fourth-class citizen.’”

“One’s upbringing matters a lot, of course, you cannot turn this dial back. Nevertheless, out of every man, we can… every man makes mistakes and has some faults. But everyone can think about himself and say ‘I cannot do this,’ ‘I must not do this,’ or ‘this is the right thing…’ I thus believe that Scouting does have a great influence even on people who became Boy Scouts when they were already older.”