Josef Roubíček

"It was at the time when Daddy was locked up, I graduated in '53 year and Daddy had just been locked up. You weren't allowed to go to Boží Dar then, because they made it a military zone and you could only go there on passes until the mid-'60s. Already in Horní Žďár, they checked on the bus who had a pass and who didn't. There were about 12 of us skiers who got a pass so that we could ride on the skis because there were already district regional championships, but anyway, at that time all the races were held in the lower mountains, in Perlinek, in Hamry, in Kraslice, because people were not allowed to go to Boží Dar. There were about five huts on Neklid, very nice ones back in '45, even some of the Jáchymov inhabitants used it. Then, when it was closed, the soldiers turned it into a shooting range, and they destroyed, apart from two huts, all the other ones on Neklid. And even the restaurant, which was on the road that led from Boží Dar to Klínovec. They destroyed the pub and the hostel so much that there was only a ruin left. When we started to go skiing there, we had to use our friends who were working on the shaft and could get some ammunition, so we could shoot the rest of the buildings and throw it into the basements to make a ski terrain."

"If we should somehow get back to the period when I started working in the mountain service from Adam, as they say, it should be the years 1945 - 1949. That was when I was still in primary school, then I went to the trade academy. We used to go up to Boží Dar with the Sokols, my dad was the chairman of the ski club, first with the Sokol Sports Union, later the Sports Unions changed several times, Slavie, then Red Star and Pozemní stavby. This was a time when, of course, there were no lifts at Boží Dar, there were no facilities for skiers. There was the Hotel Zelený dům on Boží Dar and the Hotel Praha, that was it. And we used to take the bus to Jáchymov when I was a kid. Either the bus would take us down to the spa, depending on the snow conditions, or up to the church. It was rarely possible to go up to Boží Dar in those days if there was snow because the buses simply didn't go up then because of the risk of accidents. So we regularly walked from the upper part of Jáchymov up to Neklid by two shortcuts through the forest, and when we were dropped off down in the spa part of Jáchymov, we walked up Neklid through the valley past the Brotherhood and Clement shaft. These were the uranium mines, where the prisoners who were employed, I would even say rather exhausted, at that time, were here in the Ostrov region."