Miroslav Dostál

“We would, for instance, spend a week in Ptení in the Prostějov region. There was a cabin belonging to the union. We spent a week there, about twenty boys. This was at a time when we had to have special vouchers for everything. After a couple of days, we ran out of provisions and had nothing more to eat. So we took our guitars and violins and went to play for the people in the surrounding villages. In every village we got something – a couple of eggs here, something else there. In this way we could get some food and survive the hole week.”

“I think it was called the Announcer. Foglar wrote some articles for them. He was writing about accomplishing feats there. So we would start to accomplish various feats on our own. We were practicing how to be disciplined. We started out with the feat of self-denial as a sort of training for real-life situations. I chose what I liked the most – ice cream. The feat consisted in deliberately denying myself ice cream for three months. You have to imagine that it was in the summer, during a heatwave. I made it and I can tell you that after those three months I didn’t need ice cream anymore. It meant nothing to me. So this is how we went through those harsh times.”

“Shortly before the war, in 1938, for whatever reason I was allowed to go on a Scout camp in Lukov nearby Zlín. I was a cub scout there. Lukov is a castle above the Lukov village. When the moon came out, the torso of the castle was well lit. It was actually ruins. And this is where I experienced certain things for the first time. There were many beautiful moments at this camp. We experienced a mountain hailstorm with thunder there. This was the same year that Baťa built his new palace, half of it made of glass. The hailstones were enormous in size and they broke half of the glasses in the new palace. But we were unharmed in our tents because a tent is so flexible. But all the fixed structures were shattered.”