Vladimír Novák

“The principal was tough and anti-religious. Apart from him there was another communist in the house council, and thus although I finished the eight grade with just four Bs and passed the exams, I was still only as an extra on the list of admitted applicants. On my Mom’s urging Dad got angry and he sent a letter to Prague, demanding explanation why pupils with three Cs had been subsequently admitted to that technical school whereas I with only four Bs was still on the list of extras. They invited Dad to come there and he found out that there had been some five hundred applicants and some hundred and fifty or hundred and twenty of them were admitted. They showed Dad my application, where the principal had made a note. Admission not desirable.”

“I liked being the leader of children, and we managed to keep it for one more year. At that time I was already a student of the secondary technical school, and since the four of us, that is us three brothers and our sister, did not travel anywhere for vacation, we did some summer activities with those kids instead. We were writing a chronicle, going on trips, and many other things. All these activities were then evaluated. Eventually, the leader who got the best evaluation was some girl about whom we knew that she had not been doing anything with her kids. She would just take them to a forest and let them loose there, and they weren’t really doing anything much, but her father was a painter, and he created a beautiful chronicle for her, where they made up some false stories, and thus they placed first. I was so devastated by this that I simply didn’t have the courage to tell my kids how things were, and we didn’t continue anymore it. I stopped being a leader in Pioneer.”