Miroslav Dostál

“I think it was called the Announcer. Foglar wrote some articles for them. He was writing about accomplishing feats there. So we would start to accomplish various feats on our own. We were practicing how to be disciplined. We started out with the feat of self-denial as a sort of training for real-life situations. I chose what I liked the most – ice cream. The feat consisted in deliberately denying myself ice cream for three months. You have to imagine that it was in the summer, during a heatwave. I made it and I can tell you that after those three months I didn’t need ice cream anymore. It meant nothing to me. So this is how we went through those harsh times.”

“Shortly before the war, in 1938, for whatever reason I was allowed to go on a Scout camp in Lukov nearby Zlín. I was a cub scout there. Lukov is a castle above the Lukov village. When the moon came out, the torso of the castle was well lit. It was actually ruins. And this is where I experienced certain things for the first time. There were many beautiful moments at this camp. We experienced a mountain hailstorm with thunder there. This was the same year that Baťa built his new palace, half of it made of glass. The hailstones were enormous in size and they broke half of the glasses in the new palace. But we were unharmed in our tents because a tent is so flexible. But all the fixed structures were shattered.”

“It was a specially created troop, probably on purpose. These were boys who had either no family at all, or just one parent. They all more or less had strange and unhappy family backgrounds. The first thing I did with them was to play games. I took them to the Hlubocko region because that’s where my heart is. I had many great experiences there. We played a combat game after which we had to pull ourselves back together. After they finally tied me up which took them a lot of fighting effort, they were so happy. It was quite challenging to fend off 10 boys like them, even though they were two or three years younger than me, which makes a huge difference at this age. But this game really brought us together. I felt that this was a real success and afterwards they always listened to me. I spent three years with them before the time of the military training arrived.”