“We had one case among us, where Scout brother Shadow was studying construction university in Brno and leading a troop at the same time. In 1950! And he made a big mistake, because he organised two expeditions out of Brno and someone ‘ratted’ on him. They picked him up in the evening, he was stood on trial and landed with twelve years in prison. Seeing as he had a secondary construction school, they sent him to Opava, where the prisoners with construction education were held. He was there six years. They had some task there which they didn’t complete, so they kept him there another two years, although he could have been released. Formally, they were clerks, but they had prison uniforms. He married just before that happened. So his wife, poor woman.”
“It’s interesting, we met in Skuručená once a year. One girl from Jindřichův Hradec would also come. Someone always told her about it. And she even slept there, we always slept there one night. And in ’89 we found out she worked for State Security. But nothing happened to us. They knew about us, but no one pushed us. Because by that time anti-state groups like ours were abounding in Moravia.”
“When the war was over, Dad said that because we didn’t have any news from my sister, I should set off to Prague and to Pardubice to find her. So I found her with her arm in a cast - a bomb exploded during one birthing, so they completed the birth and then rushed to the cellar. And as they were running down the stairs, another bomb fell, and the pressure wave knocked my sister from the stairs and she double-fractured her collarbone.”
Přemysl Filip was born in 1926 to Czech parents in Bratislava. He joined the Scouts in Trnava in 1936. In 1939, the family was expelled from Slovakia, settling in Valašské Meziříčí, where Přemysl Filip headed the post-war 4th Scout Troop. Between the years 1953 to 1956, he was a paratrooper in the 22nd Paratrooper Brigade of the Czechoslovak People’s Army. He became a Scout leader again in the 1960s. He disagreed with the Soviet military intervention in 1968, and the next twenty years he made his living in manual jobs. Today, he is a member of various military-historical societies and of Svojsík’s Troop [an Old Scout club named in honour of Czech Scouting founder A. B. Svojsík - transl.]. He is the Sovereign of the Secular Order of Black Beskidian Foresters. Mr. Přemysl Filip died on February 12th, 2013.
