“It’s hard to keep a pledge. Any promise is very hard to keep. The Brownies and the Cub scouts have, for instance, a sort of a pre-pledge that is not strictly binding. On the other hand, a scout promise should be kept for the entire life, so you should really think hard about what you’re actually promising and sometimes, people are too light-headed about this. Maybe it would be good to renew your personal scout promise at a later age.”
“I remember one story that is connected to the Klauz lodge. Once I was there in the winter with a parson and a theologian. We knew each other very well because they were from the Přerov region. They just came to take a look at that cabin because they were planning to come here for a summer vacation. The snow was wet and heavy and it was quite difficult to walk in it. We stayed for a while at the cabin and then walked back again. I remember that this theologian, a future parson, started to form something out of the snow. He was modeling buttocks out of the snow. We were wondering what he was doing there. It was strange to see a man of religion building a butt from snow. But he said: ‘I’m doing it for a purpose. This is the butt of Lenin. Look, what I’m gonna do to Lenin’s butt’. And he kicked that butt. I thought that was very funny. We all really enjoyed kicking comrade Lenin’s butt.”
“I used to get up at quarter to six. My grandma would have the radio turned on, listening to the weather forecast. Suddenly, there were some weird news on the radio and I figured that they had occupied us. But I still had no idea why they did it and why it was the Russians. Because at school, we were taught that the Russians are our Slavic brothers, but brothers don’t do this sort of thing. As a kid, I had a hard time figuring this out.”
“Adamík was making fun of the secret police agents even though he knew that he’d get beaten up for it. He’s still active but in a different area. He was just brilliant back then and I’ll never forget the crazy stories I was told about him by his boys. Each time something important was happening, they arrested him so that he would miss his train and so on. Once he pulled a prank on the police agents as he was about to travel somewhere and he knew that they’d arrest him. So he set out on his way with a huge package and the agents wanted to know what’s inside the package. They started to open it but there was another package in the package, and in that package was another package, and it went over and over again. Of course that they beat him up afterwards, when they found out that there’s nothing inside the package. Adamík stuffed the package with some scrap paper and because it took a lot of time for them to unpack it, their luncheon got burnt and they got very angry. They beat him up pretty bad.”
“Eventually, I went up to the attic. Next to the attic, there was a chamber where my grandpa was hiding his books and my grandma was storing apples over the winter. There stood a beautiful box for glasses. We kids totally loved that box and turned it into an altar where we held church services and played. My brother was usually serving the masses and I was sort of accompanying him musically, pretending to play the organ. When the weather was bad, there were several masses a day, sometimes even one after another. We had a beautiful night shirt that was given to us by my grandma and a couple of liturgical scarves that we wore on the head. In August 1968, I had the idea to go up there and pray to God to not let a war break out. I was pretty scared by the prospect of a war breaking out at that time.”
“No one probably has what it takes to fulfill everything to a 100 percent. But you should at least try hard and keep going on your way up. It’s like on a stair well – some only make it to the first floor, others to the second floor, but the main point is to try to get at least somewhere.”
“In August 1968, the diet changed a little bit since being uncertain of what was going to happen, my parents had bought plenty of canned meat. Another interesting thing about the days and weeks that followed the Soviet occupation was that each morning, we had delicious and crunchy rolls for breakfast. They were absolutely perfect and I dare to say that I had never before and never since eaten better rolls than the ones I had in the weeks after the occupation. You never had rolls like that afterwards anymore because the rolls were normalized. It was interesting that the bakers did the best rolls in these uncertain times. As if they wanted to show the Russians that life here was perfect. I think they made this perfectly clear to the Russians since they came to like Czechoslovakia so much that they stayed here for a very long time.”
Jindřich Vymětalík, whose scouting nickname was Šťovík, was born on November 22, 1957, in Přerov. He comes from the family of a layer and an elementary school teacher. He was greatly influenced by his grandfather, Antonín Řehák, born in 1896, who had to fight in the Austrian army in the First World War and was captured by the Russians. He then witnessed the fate of the Czechoslovak legionaries in Siberia. During WWII, Mr. Řehák was imprisoned in Mírov and he was in several concentration camps. Jindřich‘s family had trouble with the secret police (StB) in the Communist period because of his uncle who had fled to the United States of America. Jindřich was therefore labeled as politically unreliable. In the years 1977-1982, he studied at the Faculty of forestry that was a part of the University of Agriculture in Brno. He then moved to Pražmo in Beskydy, where he worked as a forest technician. At the same time, he worked with young people in the Pionýr (Pioneer) organization where he was the treasurer and manager. In the 1980s, he became the object of interest of the StB because of his activities in the Pionýr. He was drawn to scouting because of his previous experience with the Pionýr and because of literature about the Scouts. He was also influenced by the dissident František Adamík from Přerov. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Jindřich began to cooperate with the Scouts from Frýdek and on September 4, 1990, he founded a Scout unit in Pražmo. In 1998, the Štít center in Pražmo was created. The thing Jindřich Vymětal likes most about Scouting is that it made his childhood dreams come true.
