“When we were on a tour in Náchod with the Pardubice orchestra, a mist fell. The trumpet players had been given notice, they’d hired stand-ins from Prague, but the guest trumpeters were delayed in the mist, and they were supposed to play in the very first piece. So they shoved me out on to the stage and said: ‘Keep speaking until we wave to show you they’re here.’ That is sometimes the fate of moderators and presenters.”
“The execution took place at the stadium roundabout August 1945. The whole town went to see it. There was a trial, then everyone escorted the condemned to the gallows; he requested a priest, then they blindfolded him and tripped his feet. It was a rather awkward spectacle - the hangman was a gypsy in a tailcoat. He was pompously dressed to give the execution a dignified appearance, so it wouldn’t be like some murder in a ditch. But the appearance was comic because there was nothing to be pompous about.”
“The television was hot stuff: they assembled an assessment committee, and whoever said he didn’t agree with the Soviet occupation was fired. That was my case too. Whoever denied that and declared that the intervention was probably necessary, in the interests of the working class and so on, he could stay. Some of them were people who had previously disagreed with the intervention - the others looked at them askance. It was a fight for survival.”
“To be honest, Scouting was a very elite organization, although it was a mass movement. The members were people who had some ideals and principles and the capability of self-denial in the tougher situations in life. There were very interesting people in all the troops. In my teenage years, it was the perfect moment and the perfect organization for me.”
“Well, on October 14 they arrested me. It was like a scene from a Wild West movie. I was walking home from school and all of a sudden, four men with revolvers jumped at me. Who are you? I asked. They made me get into a Tatraplan car, the four of them sitting around me, they blindfolded me and drove me to Bartolomějská Street. They undressed me and searched me, allegedly to check if I didn’t have a saw for cutting the prison bars. They take everything from you, give you their clothing, the length of shoelaces is limited like this so that you cannot hang yourself on it, and they use it to tie your trousers. They led me to an underground cell which had no window, just some ventilation. There were three straw mattresses, but you were not allowed to lie down on them, you could only sit on it or walk around. At night the mattresses were put on the floor. They were stuffed with real straw, it was no luxury. And you had to sleep with your hands visible, because if a prisoner had bitten through his wrists, he would have bled to death… When the warden did not see our hands, he would start was banging on our tin door and wake up people in all the other cells.”
“Our older friend František Lukeš showed up there. His nickname was Bengál. In January 1945 he invited us to do something against the Germans. We were fifteen years old, but we enthusiastically agreed. We were not allowed to know anything, only him as a liaison. At nights we were going to cut the telephone lines of the Germans troops. There was an ammunition depot about three or four kilomeres from Písek, and they had field telephone cables installed there. We used a kind of long pole with a hook, which everybody was obliged to have in the attic in case a fire broke out during the bombardment. We used these long sticks with a hook to tear down the cables. We always quickly ran away. Fortunately, they never caught us, but it sure was a night adventure for us. We always had to bring the hooks there during the day, because it would look suspicious if somebody saw boys walking with some sticks through the town at night. We knew the surroundings well, and we thus always hid the hooks there, ran through the woods to the river and went home. We later got some decoration for it. I don’t even boast about it, because at that time people were queuing to get some decoration. You could see good-for-nothings who have not done anything at all, collecting one decoration after another that it was almost scandalous. What made us most happy was that even with such a small thing we were able to contribute to what was happening here at that time.”
Influential Czech musicologist and writer on music PhDr. Jiří Pilka, aka Jip among the Boy Scouts, was born February 20, 1930 in Prague, but as a young boy he lived in Písek. It was here where he discovered his passion for music and where he met many inspirational personalities who have influenced him for his entire life. In 1945 he actively joined the anti-Nazi movement as well as the uprising in May in which he served as a messenger. He joined the Boy Scouts after the war and in 1947 he even became the leader of the 1st Písek troop. In the same year, he traveled to France with his friend Václav Břicháček to participate in the 7th International Scout Jamboree. In 1948 he became acquainted with a group of young people called Kruh („Circle“), who were friends of Dr. Pavel Křivský. Dr. Křivský was preparing educational and self-knowledge programmes for this continuously growing fellowship. Before he moved to Prague in 1949 in order to study musicology, Jiří Pilka had briefly led the Písek branch of Kruh.
His life was severely interrupted by half a year spent in prison. In a staged trial against Pavel Křivský, Jiří was accused of anti-state activity and imprisoned in the Pankrác prison. With great difficulties he managed to complete his studies and to pursue career in his field. In 1969 he became the head editor of the music department of the Czechoslovak Television, but with the continuing strengthening of the communist regime he was later fired for political reasons. He worked as the director of the music department of the Theatre Institute at the time of the Velvet Revolution. In the 1990s he led the FOK Prague Symphonic Orchestra and the International Television Festival Golden Prague. He focused mainly on popularization of music and writing. Jiří Pilka died on 7 July 2018.
