Pavel Kvapil

“Our house stands in a garden and there was a gate to the garden. There was an electric lock on the gate. It was closed and one needed to have a key or open it with a buzzer. State Security officers came and rang the bell on the gate. We pretended that we did not understand them via the speaker, so we went to have a look from the window to see who was there. We saw some men, so we said it to our dad. Dad went calmly down, to the gate and asked them what they wanted. He did not hear well at that time, so he let them to repeat it. Then they gave him a permission to carry out the house search. And when he took it over the gate, he told them that he did not have glasses and that he needed to go and take them. So, he took it upstairs home. He read it there calmly and the men were standing outside. It was not an assault squat but common men in plain-clothes, secret police officers. It gave him a hard time outside. And in the meantime, we were cleaning at home and our cousin was burning some documents in the stove in the clubroom. We felt it at that time... It was higher self-consciousness. We had more experience.”

“Besides the participating children, there were also leaders in the camp. There were also young women who cooked there, they were pretty nice young women, they were seventeen, eighteen years old. The son of owner of the meadow who had borrowed it to us was a young, seventeen years old man. He had been working in United Agriculture Cooperative for a short time and he fancied those young women. Once he came on a tractor to the camp to show off. But it was a tractor who was suitable for lowlands and flat fields, but it was not suitable for hills. He was showing off a bit with the tractor and there was an accident above the camp. He did not manage driving, the tractor started to roll towards the camp, and it broke down into two pieces. Fortunately, it did not hit any of the children. But we had a big problem because it was clear that it was property of the United Agriculture Cooperative. It was clear that he would have to report it and that the National Security Corps officers would come to investigate it and that they would find the camp there. So, the fact that we needed to get the tractor from the steep meadow somewhere lower became event for the whole night. So, we arranged it as an accident that he went down from the road and rolled over there. The operation took us the whole night. We packed all the children in the morning and hurried with them on a whole-day trip to be away from the camp so that there would not be any screaming. The National Security Corps officers came to investigate it when the boy announced it and fortunately, they moved around the tractor in the lower part and could not see up the meadow from there. They could not see that tents were built there, so they did not find out about the camp.”