Juraj Lukáč

„There was only one radio and I remember that the whole village was listening to that radio. And what I remember very much was Svoboda, whom I considered a hero at the time, and basically only then did I hear from my father that he wasn't that great, but he had enormous authority, I know that. And from that radio, I remember his speech when he said to keep calm, to definitely not shoot at anyone, he called on the army not to fight, it was like that, hey. And everyone in that village in Olejníkov thought that the war had started. And no one knew, and the fourteen-year-old me said - well, they just happened to be withdrawing from the exercise and something, my brain just didn't understand that what happened would happen. And then I went home to Humenné and there were no trains in Sabinov and there were tanks on the tracks and one crazy soldier was shooting at me. Because I came from the forest in green tramp clothes. I looked like the US Army“

„So yes, we were the Basic Organization of the SZOPK and we started with the foresters by planting trees. Then it just seemed strange to us that we were planting spruces and pines and they were cutting firs and beeches. So we began to notice the difference between how nature grows the forest and what society does with it. We found out that there are big differences, so paradoxically, we then started to pull out the seedlings that we once planted and put trees from the forest roads that naturally belonged there – firs and beeches. And so, over the course of those ten years, our view of what was happening with the forests was slowly transformed to almost political activism, and the eighty-ninth year came when I was still trying to reform the Slovak Union of Nature Protectors, but I found out that it is a communist organization whose reform will not help. That's how the forest protection group Vlk was created as an organization itself, a civil association, which was already politically possible.“

„Either plowing, or sowing, or mowing, or weighing hay. Until dark, hey. So they didn't even work according to the clock, but according to how the sun went. So, in winter, the working day was significantly shorter, and in winter, their vacation was essentially, one could say, agricultural, because they only repaired tools. I remember that too. Only tools were repaired, and the women there worked with the canvas, made threads, because they also grew hemp. Every resident of that village had both a hemp field and a flax field. Hemp was used to make sheets with a very coarse pattern, as well as work pants, which I remember were very stingy, and linen was used to make decent fabrics. That was several hectares of both hemp and flax, and it was processed that winter. And I know that the whole village used to gather at my grandmother's place and there was „Facebook“. Everything was taken over there from left to right. All gossip.“