Petr Kadleček

"But when they started saying they were coming from Poland, our guys went up, cut down trees on the road and dumped bags of nails. Someone said they started threatening that if no one came to remove it immediately, they would shoot at Harrachov. But I think nobody removed it, and they had to remove the trees themselves. We were all angry and signed all kinds of resolutions about it. Since I lived in Rýžoviště, as all kinds of signposts were twisted and turned, the signpost to Prague was turned to Rýžoviště in Harrachov. A man drove up there with a truck, saw that he couldn't get anywhere, turned around and drove back. I followed him on my motorbike to work in the morning, and he stopped in front of me, I guess he wanted to ask someone who was walking by something, and I hit his back wheel. I bent the front forks, so I was even more pissed at them."

"First, the Krušné Mountains started, then the chimneys were expanded to make them longer and to spread the abominations over a larger area. Experts say that from 1972 onwards, it was noticeable, which we hadn't deemed that way yet. And they posit that by weakening the vegetation through immission, the expansion of pests was encouraged. First, the larch budmoth started, the calamity set in. I had one picture of what it looks like when the budmoth eats. It eats all the green needles that grow on the shoots in the spring and then it comes down from the canopy on strands. Let me tell you, in the woods, you could rake through all of those threads that were hanging down with your hands. At first, they sprayed the budmoth. It's called larch budmoth, but it mostly eats spruce trees. Somebody must have found it on a larch tree, and that's what they named it. It's classified as a calamity pest. Doing the spraying was like a military crusade. That's what meteorologists were for, to know the right weather. There had to be helicopters and raised platforms, they had to mark out the flying fields, they marked them with white, yellow flags or red flags. Red flags around the waterways so they wouldn't spray in the water, yellow flags were for platforms, I think, white flags for helicopters, whatever. The firemen helped us fill the tanks on the planes and helicopters. There were experts and they had to say at what stage of development it was best to use it on the budmoths because there were stages that weren't killed by it. We even had walkie-talkies."

"My father was somewhat active in 1953 when the currency reform was going on. When the workers had a rally in the factory, I think he got very angry. As I can imagine him, he was probably scolding the state for being thieves because they had liquidated the workers' pension fund. He came to defence and was angry also because he was saving up, and when he'd had a hundred thousand, he was going to open his own shop, a locksmith shop. He could do that, he was good at that. The result was that after the speech, someone rang the bell in the factory at night, I slept like a little boy, and my dear father was taken to court and fired from his job for an hour. Which wouldn't have mattered so much, but they weren't allowed to take him anywhere else, in another factory. No matter where he applied, when they found out he was old Kadleček, he didn't get in. So he ended up as a construction worker. But everything turned around again. I remember that in the eighties because he was a machinist, he used to go to fairs to show off the machine tools. He was at a fair in Moscow, Berlin, somewhere in Izmir, Turkey, I don't know if he was in Munich, maybe. There, he demonstrated these machines, and eventually, he was appreciated as an expert. I could have been worried that he was fired from his job, but the justification at the entrance examination for taking me was, 'The applicant is of working-class origin.' And only after that, they said I had a good overview and things like that."

"The worst of it was around nine hundred metres, like the Alfrédka hunting lodge. Above it is a crossroads about one thousand and fifty meters high. The immission hit stands that didn't even yield solid timber, they were full of breaks, branching down to the ground, so knagged. We had an ESA logging junction at Alfrédka to which the trees were pulled up, branched off and manipulated. He was unhappy when it was old breaks. There were these bayonets, they made signposts out of them, or you could find a stick for Krakonoš. But it wasn't worth much as timber for reasonable workmanship. The Poles just over the border kept it simple. They sent in, it looked a bit like tanks without barrels, and they cut down dry, ugly growth at the same altitudes and left it all there. They only mined what they could use. Then it went fast. It helped tremendously that on New Year's Eve 1978, it was about ten degrees above zero and by morning, it had dropped to minus twenty. I think it was a shock to nature and people. Some people were out celebrating New Year's Eve at Alfrédka, and by the time they got home, their fingers were frostbitten. It was a shock to nature in general. And from then, it's gone downhill terribly fast. It must have been a shock when the temperature changed thirty degrees to such a frost. It was a shock, and when you added the emissions to that, you could see the trees started to fall, to die. The snow was covered with needles, the skiers were furious, they greased with klister and didn't get far. The needles stuck to the skis."