Milan Skácel

* 1934

  • "We had a radio studio 3, which broadcast on short waves. Our radio could be heard as far as in Bulgaria. We were receiving broadcasting from England on our communication devices. Jana, who was a line worker operating the teletype, was translating it from English. We were able to inform everybody around using the short wave frequency. All these sins, Scouting included, were the reasons for our dismissal from the factory and from our jobs; luckily Jana was spared. The children didn’t get admitted to schools. It was not a good time. But had the conditions in the 1970s been like those in the 1950s, I would have spent some years behind the bars for it. And I wouldn’t have been alone."

  • "The comrades arrested Pavel in 1948 during some student demonstration. He spent some fifteen years in the labour camp in Jáchymov. Recently he received the doctor honoris causa degree in law. He is a great and honest man. He had taken upon himself a penalty which was intended for somebody else who had a wife and family. All this time, his girlfriend had been faithfully waiting for him and she then married him. Although they expected that they wouldn't be able to have children, because Pavel had worked in the uranium mines Jáchymov, they had three beautiful boys."

  • "Šark-Šandera, the correspondent for the Hradec region, came to see us. He was entrusted with leading a nursing school. He had joined the Party shortly before, because as a reasonable man he wanted to support the Party in its revival process. He had a staunch communist in his school, the school caretaker. In 1970, the band decided not to surrender their instruments to the communists. Since Šark was a former regional correspondent, they took the instruments to his school and asked him to keep them there. Šark had played with the band when he was a student. They hid the instruments by walling them up in the school wall. Thanks to his help, the band had their instruments available immediately after the Velvet revolution."

  • "When we went for a camp, we had to take food stamps with us in order to get our ration of groceries. For example, we could have one loaf of white bread per month. Without the food stamps, the camp leaders wouldn’t be able to get any food. Mom had to cut off an appropriate number of food stamps which we used to buy food. The grocer had to know for how long we would stay there and how much we would consume, because normally he was getting only limited supply for the village. It was not like today when you get whatever you want. People didn’t have money after the war."

  • "A folklore festival was held in Strážnice every year at the end of June. I was a student then and I worked as an usher in the stadium where the festival took place. A bunch of girls got in. I said to them: 'Your tickets, girls!' – 'You won’t kick us out, will you...? You are a student, too…' – 'All right, you can sit here.' At noon I told them: 'Now, girls, get out of here!' – 'Come on, won’t really kick us out,' they replied. Jana was the one who spoke for them. That’s how we met, and then we kept in touch through letters; she was from Prague. We met in 1955 during the Spartakiada sport event and that was it. We married in 1957. She was a fine girl. Our first daughter was born in 1958, and our second in 1965, because there were some health problems in between."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Praha, 19.12.2011

    (audio)
    délka: 01:35:29
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu A Century of Boy Scouts
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The restoration of Scouting in 1968 was a lot more joyful and had greater support from the society than the restoration in 1989.

Milan Skácel - Kobra was born October 23, 1934 in Žďánice near Hodonín. After WWII he joined a Boy Scout troop (the patrol Lišky - Foxes) in Strážnice near Veselí nad Moravou. He was one of the three sons of the local higher elementary school teacher and principal. It was his older brother, who had been a Boy Scout before the war, who introduced Milan to Scouting. In 1946 and 1947 he participated in camps in the Moon Valley in the Carpathian Mountains. The ban on Scouting and the political transformation after 1948 did not hit them as severely as the Scouts in Prague; he and his friends kept meeting in pubs and tramping together. He studied the military academy in Nové Mesto nad Váhom and then worked as a professional soldier for nine years in the communications regiment in Pardubice. He married and during the restoration of Scouting in 1968 he and his wife moved from Pardubice to Hradec Králové, where he joined the 18th troop. After two years of activity and two camps in Muchov (under the village of Nebeská Rybná on the river Zdobnice in Eagle Mountains) their troop became disbanded. Milan Skácel was dismissed from the party and from his job in 1974 due to illegal operation of a radio station. In 1989, as an Oldscout and official, he took part in the third restoration of Scouting, which in his eyes was not as joyful as the one in 1968. He and his wife have worked for the Czech Scouting movement on the international level.