Vladimír Včela

“The summer camp was a great experience. It was fabulous, a very unusual experience. We were playing a game and I was out of the camp. I was coming back and behind Vilánec, there’s a hill in the forest. There was a group of Soviet soldiers. It was just after the war, so it was quite normal to spot groups of Russian soldiers. They were slaughtering a cow there. They killed it and they had a field kitchen, right next to it. They were just starting to cut it up when I was walking past. I had never seen a dead cow before. One of the soldiers gave me a piece of meat and said, ‘here you are’. I brought it into the camp and of course it was a great feat because in those times food was very scarce and meat even more so.”

“Please, have a diary where you put down what you ate for lunch and every now and then, add in which year it was. Add at least the year. There’s so much you’ve done in your life that sometimes, when you’re going through your picture collections, you don’t know if it was in 1968, 1942, or before the war or if it was in the 1990s. Note at least, the year. Don’t note, what you had for lunch but put down where you camped, from when to when, five lines are enough. After twenty or fifty years, you’ll be able to act smart, by remembering everything. I mean, I didn’t do it, nobody really does it and therefore, a lot of things get lost.”