Olivier Lichý

“In 1990, there were still sokols abroad, and every 4 years we organised a meeting of them. That year, the slet took place in Paris and two months later, in July 1990, the Czech sokol came back into existence and organised a small slet in Prague. Obviously, we met there, and with a lot of emotion because, when we marched, there were lots of people around the parade and grandmothers who were crying and waving at us. It was a very emotional moment."

“My father started out in politics, but he was in a party opposed to the Communist Party. When the Communists came to power in 1948, they started putting people in prison because they didn’t think like them. My father lived in Znojmo, not very far from Austria, and as he had a friend who was a forest ranger, who knew the forest like the back of his hand, he knew exactly where to cross the border without being spotted by the customs officers. When the Communists started putting people in prison, the party my father belonged to organised escapes for people in prison, which then went through his network, as he had organised the whole thing. But the Czech police were no more stupid than my father was intelligent, so a few months later, the Communists came to power in February 1948, and by May 1948, he had already got a number of people to leave, but the Czech police managed to discover this network, and my father, whose father was a gendarme, was warned that the police were going to come and arrest him the next day. So he got his comrades together, because 3 people were with him to organise the escape route, so in May 1948, my father escaped, so as not to be imprisoned."