Jaroslav Šebek

“My newspaper activities in the scout brought me to the secret police – we publish the magazine Kim. It has been published for thirty-four years without a break, it is our division’s chronicle. Back then, I was spending time with Foglar so I had plenty of materials. Today they are known to the public but back then we included excerpts from chronicles, his remarks, photos, etc., and people were interested. What is more, I had the written series, stories. I compiled the story book Jestřábe, vypravuj. I have to humbly say that I made up this title. And so I put various things from Foglar into the Kim magazine. The boys brought it home and perhaps their parents read it even more than the kids. The opportunities for copying were lousy back then. Someone brought it to the prison in Boleslav - a warden. There they had a copy machine. And he photocopied Foglar’s stories, and they spread around until it got into the hands of certain Mr. Černý, the head of the prison. He found it weird so he brought it to the secret police.”

“We may have been in tears from all the anger. We were young, full of optimism, wanted to do it. So we carried on. Junák was dissolved and our division came to an agreement at the Christmas meeting that it would cease activities which it did. We shared our things, some documents were made. We split up. But even before we weren’t able to get to our clubhouse. They didn’t want to get it open for us because it was in the Boleslav distillery. There was a gatehouse through which we had to pass. And probably the director of the factory gave an instruction not to let us in because they were already handing the possessions to the Pionýr. We were angry about it and so a couple of us decided to carry on scouting. We even published the magazine Junáček. We didn’t have too many ideas, it was all inside us. We even called our club Psohlavci [Dogheads] and as an enblem used part of what Svojsík had Mikoláš Aleš draw for him. So we edited it to get an emblem. And we ran the scout on our own.”