Lubomír Kantor

“It happened during the morning warm-up. The airplanes were buzzing above our heads. Although everybody had expected them to attack us, nobody really wanted to realize it at that moment. Somebody made a joke: ‘they’re here already’. One brother, a Major of the Czechoslovak army, noted that these were not airplanes of our army. Suddenly, everybody got serious. Tácin, the husband of our friend Lída, went to his tent and put on the radio. It was the only radio we had in the camp. On the radio, we heard the horrors. Can you image? ‘Our country had been occupied by the armies of the Warsaw Pact. Remain calm, don’t panic. It will all clarify’. We immediately knew what was going on. The men were angry, they blasted and some wanted to go to the army barracks, get some rifles and give the Russians a fight. There was a lot of crying. Somebody even vomited! Nobody touched his breakfast. It was a terrible moment. In the midst of the worst awe, the leader of the forest school in Jesenice came and said: ‘it’s clear already, they’ll let us scrape along for two years and then they’ll shut us down completely.”

“So we got ourselves together and all of a sudden we had our first meeting. Do you know where it was? It was in Kateřinská street, the later seat of the city police. We were meeting there and I didn’t like it at all. I was just lucky that I couldn’t come to these meetings because I was teaching evening classes. So my son Lumír was attending instead and he always told me after wards how the brothers were quarreling. You had these old great, experienced, sensational scouts. They were a bit older and they were nervous, so they would simply quarrel. The whole period was like this, judging from what I saw. Brother Drva told me that we must not have two girls there, two women. There can only be one. Because if we had two, they would constantly fight. Now, can you imagine we learned about how the old scouts were quarrelling? They’re all amazing lads, young fellows, about 85 or so. With their ulcers in the legs, wearing just shorts. They got a lot younger and more up for a fight. So these were the scouts. And the girl scouts, instead of quarreling, they founded the club of grandma scouts. So these were my feelings from the time. I saw or was told what’s going on and I went there every week. I went to see my parents in Zlín on Saturday. In Zlín, we would read it on the board that the scouts were holding a rally in Masaryk’s schools before Christmass. And we kept standing.”

“Look, we sensed the relaxation in the society in the same way we sensed it 40 or 45 years ago. In every period they had eliminated us, we sensed something coming and had such a premonition that we would be free to scout again. We expected this in 89 and were nervous because it was not forthcoming. The revolutions were taking place in all the other countries – Hungary, Germany, Poland but nothing was happening here. For instance in Poland – they had their famous trade union organization called Solidarity that dismantled the Communist regime. It actually broke up from within. First and foremost, it fell apart in Russia. And what was the cause? U.S. economic pressure. The biggest merit goes to U.S. president-actor Reagan who introduced so-called Star wars that cost too much money and exhausted Russia. The Americans basically armed Russia to death. That was a new word which originates in that era – to arm to death.”