Václav Myslivec

"I had an operation in 1982, then, I quit the party. From 1983 until the end of the centres in 1990, I was on the Jilemnice circuit." - "That must have been an awful lot of work since 1978? Petr Kadleček said that the first to invade the weakened forests was the larch budmoth, and then the bark beetle joined in. Was it a lot of work, hard work? There was no forest management. Was it like a factory?" - "It was an industry, a wood processing factory, you couldn't talk about forestry. Petr's right. The budmoth was the first sign that the forests were dying. The budmoth got it gnawed off, weakened it, it was the acorns that rained droppings. It looked horrible. It got sprayed. Then the bark beetle started to come into the weakened stands at eight hundred and nine hundred meters above sea level in the upper parts in a terrible way. You cut a wall [of forest] that was infested, and unless you went thirty or forty paces into the green, you never caught up. And in a month and a half, we were back there. It was endless, it was desperate."

"It was interesting, I slept upstairs in the chamber in the evening to keep me quiet. I was woken up by a noise, a heavy noise. In the morning at four o'clock my father went to the shed, turned on the radio and came upstairs, saying, 'Wake up, they're occupying us!' - 'Who? The Germans again?' - 'No, the Russians!' So we flew out, we didn't know what to do. We just... sort of, of course, people were shocked. Me and my mate and I were still like, 'Nothing's happening here, so we'll go and see what's going on. We drove down to Mejto to Poniklý, we saw how it was rolling, tanks to Jilemnice and towards Kundratice, a continuous stream. Then there was a gap in between, we joined in, we said, 'We'll drive down to the Sítová Bridge', but as soon as the guys [Soviet Army drivers] saw that we were engaged, they started to squeeze us a little bit. And we were awfully glad when we got to the Sítová Bridge and could turn back to Sítová. There was nowhere else to turn. On the right was the Jizera River, on the left a rock, we were so stupid."

"They were mostly easterners, a diverse mix. There were exceptional ones. Guys were running away from the guard because they were guarding ammunition. There were things... a kid ran off with a machine gun, he wasn't heading West, he didn't want to shoot his way across the border, he was running home to his mom. They caught up with him somewhere near Lubenec, whether he'd taken a shot at them, a soldier with a machine gun, well, he was shot. They found out about him, the police didn't deal with it, the department did it themselves. There were two or three extempore." - "A lot of those foot soldiers. For example, when the gipsies came to the army, they ran away a lot." - "It was hard for them, they were quite wild-natured, they ran to the pub, they tried, they sold kit parts, whatever they could. And they would rob their mates to get money for booze, it was bad. The image of it then is that the battery commander tried to cover it up, it cast a bad light on him. But anyway, [we had] two Hungarians, one served one hundred and sixty days and the other one hundred and eighty days when we returned to civilian life. And I was to command that one..."

"It was already known that the Krušné Mountains and the Jizera Mountains, that it was gone and that it was rolling onto the Krkonoše Mountains into the trees. So we set up production and transport centres, just specialising in mining and technology. And people from near the forests who didn't resist in any way. It was a lot of people, tractors, horses, cable cars, everything. There were two logging centres, and from the closed sections, my friends from Semily and I all got together at the production and transport centre in Jilemnice, where in 1978, it slowly started to prepare and to mine these things in the mountains, it had already started. Before that, cross-country tracks were being made from 1976. When I was still a forester, nobody knew anything about it. All of a sudden, there was timber lying around, holes were made in the forest, the vegetation was opened up, and the pollutants had better access. It was done, and for the next thirteen years, we were in the mud with the machinery. Forestry as in the SLH after the war. When there was a lot of young growth at the bottom after the nun moths and old cover at the top."