"The Gestapo in Hradec arrested my father and they were not able to get any information from him. At that time, spittoons were in fashion, and the Gestapo man forced my dad to walk around the Hradec prison and drink the content of those spittoons. They wanted him to confess to something he had not done. This is the only thing that dad has told me."
"At that time, we became attracted to Rychlé šípy (Rapid Arrows) in the Mladý Hlasatel magazine, and we therefore formed the magazine readers' club. There were five of us, and we thus began calling ourselves the Funny Five. In summers, we were competing for the scout badges according to the rules set by Foglar, which was a very good activity, because no finances were required for that and we could cover it all from our own sources. In winters we were playing puppet theatre. We were doing it for about four winters, and since there was no firewood, the entrance to the show was one wooden log, and everyone thus had to bring a log in order not to feel cold during the performance."
"At the time when I declared that it was an occupation, I was in charge of ten thousand soldiers. I was somebody who said this publicly, and I was even going among the soldiers and telling this to them. I was summoned to the ministry, and they said: ´You have an opportunity to renounce it, sit down, here is a paper, renounce what you had said and write the names of people who are opposed against the entry of the Soviet army.´ I replied: ´I cannot remember them.´ I was against the entry of the Soviet army, and thus I was dismissed. ´So you refuse to renounce it? ´ - ´Yes.´ And thus I left, because in my opinion it was an occupation."
Vratislav Pech, aka Samson among the Scouts, was born on August 14, 1929. His father was arrested by the Gestapo during World War II. In 1940 he and his friends, who were avid followers of Jaroslav Foglar‘s books, formed a readers‘ club of the Mladý Hlasatel (Young Herald) magazine called Veselá Pětka (The Funny Five) in Svobodné Dvory near Hradec Králové. After the war in 1945, he joined the 19th troop in Hradec Králové, and in 1946 he participated in the Regional forest school for troop leaders. He studied at a military academy, where he was expected to become a propaganda officer, but due to his protest against a regulation ordering shooting into a crowd of workers he was involuntarily transferred to an ordinary military service. In the 1960s he held a high position in the army, but he does not like to talk much about this part of his life. In 1968 he was dismissed from the army because he was outspoken about his opinion on 21st August 1968, calling it a genuine occupation of Czechoslovakia,. After his dismissal from the army he became a sewer cleaner in a train engine house, and later he became an engine-driver. At present time he focuses his interest on research related to the battle of Hradec Králové in 1866.
