Milan Skácel

"A folklore festival was held in Strážnice every year at the end of June. I was a student then and I worked as an usher in the stadium where the festival took place. A bunch of girls got in. I said to them: 'Your tickets, girls!' – 'You won’t kick us out, will you...? You are a student, too…' – 'All right, you can sit here.' At noon I told them: 'Now, girls, get out of here!' – 'Come on, won’t really kick us out,' they replied. Jana was the one who spoke for them. That’s how we met, and then we kept in touch through letters; she was from Prague. We met in 1955 during the Spartakiada sport event and that was it. We married in 1957. She was a fine girl. Our first daughter was born in 1958, and our second in 1965, because there were some health problems in between."

"We had a radio studio 3, which broadcast on short waves. Our radio could be heard as far as in Bulgaria. We were receiving broadcasting from England on our communication devices. Jana, who was a line worker operating the teletype, was translating it from English. We were able to inform everybody around using the short wave frequency. All these sins, Scouting included, were the reasons for our dismissal from the factory and from our jobs; luckily Jana was spared. The children didn’t get admitted to schools. It was not a good time. But had the conditions in the 1970s been like those in the 1950s, I would have spent some years behind the bars for it. And I wouldn’t have been alone."

"The comrades arrested Pavel in 1948 during some student demonstration. He spent some fifteen years in the labour camp in Jáchymov. Recently he received the doctor honoris causa degree in law. He is a great and honest man. He had taken upon himself a penalty which was intended for somebody else who had a wife and family. All this time, his girlfriend had been faithfully waiting for him and she then married him. Although they expected that they wouldn't be able to have children, because Pavel had worked in the uranium mines Jáchymov, they had three beautiful boys."

"Šark-Šandera, the correspondent for the Hradec region, came to see us. He was entrusted with leading a nursing school. He had joined the Party shortly before, because as a reasonable man he wanted to support the Party in its revival process. He had a staunch communist in his school, the school caretaker. In 1970, the band decided not to surrender their instruments to the communists. Since Šark was a former regional correspondent, they took the instruments to his school and asked him to keep them there. Šark had played with the band when he was a student. They hid the instruments by walling them up in the school wall. Thanks to his help, the band had their instruments available immediately after the Velvet revolution."