Hana Hortová

There are people who say that the Spartakiad got rid of physical education that is not true. At the last Spartakiad, the girls had jump ropes, they practically didn't get off them, and try jumping for twenty minutes and they also had double jumps, they were completely prepared, I know because I did the song with them. The compositions were made so that the children were in constant motion, because when the composition is done on markers, you can't look at it, you need to run somewhere, to jump somewhere, to turn somewhere, maybe even twice, if you have on the back, for example, a different colour T-shirt, so that it can be seen. All this added variety to the composition, the girls liked it, especially when David started singing. It was also probably forgotten that physical education class has a structure. At the beginning, there is an introduction, that means starting, reporting, then there is a warm-up, then there is the content of the class; athletics, ball games or gymnastics, and finally the clock roars and they go to the locker room. In other words, the Spartakiad was only learned in the warm-up, which was really a warm-up. I always unlearned physical education, except for the last week, when we had to go to Prague. That was about something else, it was made perfect. So it was criticized by those who didn't see it and didn't do it. That was in the spirit of Tyrš, and the continuation of Sokol was not affected by it. A thousand times someone could sing a building song there. It just did not come off, everyone took it that way. We had a training camp in Nymburk, in the evening we went to the island where we were staying, we walked past the statue of Miroslav Tyrš and we all sang to him 'Lion's power, Sokol´s takeoff'.

Students in my grade were lucky for we could graduate in normal dress. The following year, where there were mostly doctor's children, there were Míla Dražanová, Jitka Stehlíková and many others, so they got into incredible trouble. Their parents, or at least one of them, had an academic degree. He was a doctor, another one was a doctor of philosophy, an engineer, or whatever, but he was a college graduate. These unfortunates, who graduated a year after us, firstly graduated in Svazák shirts, it was already mandatory in a way, and secondly, they got punished for their parents' degrees. They were not allowed to graduate because of those degrees. So this group, which was supposed to graduate in 1951, joined the ČKD to get to know the work of workers, peasants and others, and only then that they would let them do the matriculation. It was not whether they would be allowed to go to college, but they wouldn't have a high school diploma at all. So they joined the factory. Be that as it may, sometimes incredible things happened. One of my friends, Jirka Hulínský, was among them. His father is still known in Slané as a writer and historian. He left the family when the boy was born. He left them, he did not take care of the child, and the mother raised him alone. And even this boy, who actually didn't have a dad at all, paid for the fact that his dad had an academic degree, he was also not allowed to graduate. It was the greatest irony I have ever encountered. So it was the 1950s at the Slaný gymnasium.