Ing. Ivo Dostál

"I grew up, now it's called ecology or the environmental movement, but by liking botany or ornithology or animal science in general... I grew up on the Bečva River in Hranice and I saw how the flow was getting... the water was full of fish and then suddenly it wasn't. We also went on an excursion to Kralický Sněžník, for example, and when you see how the grass there is pockmarked with yellow dots, that means it's raining sulfuric acid, or DDT, how it's destroying all life. There was no way for a person to think that was good."

"Those people just confirmed it to us that Dyje used to be cleaned. There was a suction dredger that used to go there and extract gravel, which was sold, of course. The surrounding countryside was crisscrossed with a network of drainage canals. When there was a flood, because a flood always comes, no matter where it is, and no defences can ever help. So the water quickly went down those canals into that river, which carried the water away. But since the displacement, it stopped doing that, the dredge was still going there sometime in the 50s, those canals got overgrown and now any water that was just a little bit in the spring, as water used to be, it would always get dredged up, flooded the meadows, they were mostly there, or possibly the fields, because the land was fertile. So the idea came up that there should be this reservoir built in that flat landscape that would permanently flood what was flooded."

"Look, in such a large community, they look out for each other. And everybody's scared, mostly. So we, when we were there on an occasional visit, and as a child, we didn't talk about it. And the co-op that was formed there, the one that I remember, it was terrible for the relatives, because there they valued the work by the number of units, and the units were of some very minimal value, so they lived in terrible poverty. I know this one aunt used to go barefoot all the time, and her hands were hard, just smashed and so on. And I just know that my dad told them to just hang on, that it would get better, like I know it was there, to just hang on, which was true. That then it really kind of, because one, it was rich, the land, so they were doing pretty well then, and I know that maybe they had their first television right here, this auntie who used to go barefoot."