Zdeňka Kurková

* 1932

  • “It was a great camp, but we had to pack everything in a hurry about two days before, because the Bandera troops were crossing Slovakia. They were coming from Poland and they wanted to get to the American sector. They were Russians who had fought the Germans. They were thus fleeing and I think that our army even intervened against them somewhere, and therefore they ordered us to pack quickly and leave – I think we even rode in a cattle truck from there.”

  • “That camp was somewhat funny, because our leader thought that since we were behind a river and a big hill nobody would bother us there, and therefore nobody really watched the camp. After some time we found out that some mess tins which were hanging from the hooks by the kitchen were missing. They kept disappearing, but we still didn’t know where to. Later we discovered that some two kilometers from our camp, a boys’ troop from Bratislava had their camp, and they were sneaking into our camp and stealing our mess tins. They kept wondering why we didn’t suspect anything and why we were not watching our camp. Eventually they invited us to their camp and we had some sort of a get-together, we played volleyball with them and some games, and they gave us our mess tins back.”

  • “One time our troop set out for a trip to the Choč Mountains, for three days, we were fifteen-year-old girls. We walked through all of the Choč Mountains, and while we were up there we got surprised by a terrible storm, and we were thus hurrying down through the dwarf mountain pine because we saw that there was some mountain hut down there, and they eventually let us spend the night there. Running through the pine was terrible, because it was nearly dark, and I remember that I was wearing a Girls Scout’s skirt with buttons, and when I reached the hut, all the buttons were gone. It was a great trip. I don’t remember the route anymore, but it was in the Choč Mountains, and it was nice, a three-day trip. I was surprised that our leaders just let us go like that, without having a mobile phone or something like that, without watching us…”

  • Full recordings
  • 1

    Místo natáčení neznámé, 02.11.2011

    (audio)
    duration: 01:04:04
    media recorded in project A Century of Boy Scouts
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Scouting is beneficial in everything. In its respect for nature, respect for people, and it forms certain character in men.

Zdeňka Kurková
Zdeňka Kurková
photo: Skautské století

  Zdeňka Kurková, aka Muchomůrka (“Amanita”) among the Scouts, was born October 22, 1932 in Brno. She joined a Scout troop in 1946 and she participated in her first camp in the same year. She experienced three wonderful years with Scouting; after the ban and the subsequent revival of the Scouting movement she has not returned to it anymore, but she still likes to remember the time she had spent in the Scout troop. She worked at the Faculty of Engineering of the University in Brno.