"A lot of things in the society have loosened up and a very strong scouting movement has emerged in České Budějovice. I just don't know where it came from. There was a chance to renew the activities of Scouting and Junák and there was a very strong movement in České Budějovice. There were just too many Scouts everywhere at once. Scouts were marching on the roads everywhere, walking with flags... And the pioneers – there was the first town pioneer group, where there were about thirty or forty of us, and that was it. We were terribly few, it wasn't... then when I was in the ninth grade, there was a change again. And again, it was the other way around. I didn't have to study hardly anything and I got straight A's all the time. Teachers came to me to help start a Pioneer organization at school and stuff. So then, when you think about the behaviour of those adults, the same teachers, the same people were suddenly like that and then like that again, and that's exactly what happened again at the grammar school."
"In June 2002, I think it was June 29th, we had a board meeting in Prague and I just went to Prague for the meeting. There I was then called by Mr. Kučera, Mr. Šmarda and Mr. Žák, who was the chairman of the Fond dětí a mládeže [Children and Youth Fund – trans.] at that time. Mr. Šmarda basically had no function, he was just a great friend of Mr. Kučera and there they told me that they were introducing a new general director which means I was quitting. The new general director was again some friend, Lukáš Fiedler, who at that time was just out of law school, and at that time they told me not to make any problems out of it, that Mr. Fiedler had absolutely no knowledge of these things, that he didn't know what was going on there at all, that he had never worked there, and that I would continue to work there as a manager in the company. And it was exact, they had scheduled it for the exact day because I was actually going to go on holiday the next day, so I remember it quite well. On that day, when we left the board meeting, I didn't go back alone, but everybody went with me, Mr. Fiedler, Šmarda, Kučera. They went with me to Seč and I could only take my personal things from the office, I had to hand over all my keys immediately, everything. I couldn't even delete my private things from the computer or anything, I just had to leave. Just a few things I had in my drawers I could take with me. The next day, I talked to Mr. Fiedler. He told me that really, when I got back from vacation, he would be happy for me to advise him, to help him, that I could pick any office I wanted then, and that I would continue to work normally. In the meantime, I went on holiday. And I came back from holiday a fortnight later with the fact that I had a little soul in me. Mr. Fiedler called me in. Already the secretary told me: Alča, it's bad, he's been doing nothing for a whole fortnight but looking for what he could find on you, what he could think up on you. He had already prepared an immediate resignation letter for me, he had then threatened me, that they had found out that I was doing some managerial misconduct there."
"I think this trip was more informative because I knew the language, it was important there. And I know that in Tallinn, for example, the first persuasion or the first nagging in my head started, that everything is probably not as they tell us or as they talk about it, because in Tallinn... First of all, a bearing of our Trabant broke down there, I still remember it's called podshipniki, and there was a guy called Oleg Kotík who was fixing it for us, that was his name, and we were talking and he asked me what currency we had, and I said, we had the crown, and he said, when we had freedom, we had the crown too. That was the first notion. And then the second one was when we were just shuffled again into this group of tourists in Tallinn and there was this girl as a guide and I was struck by how well she spoke Russian, that she spoke Russian well, Russians usually gabbled quite a lot and this one spoke very nicely, very slowly, in standard language and so on. When we finished, I said to her, you speak such nice Russian. And she says to me, where are you from. I said, we're Czech. And she says, you know, this Russian language is as foreign to me as it is to you. So those were kind of the first ones where I was thinking afterwards and I was like, there's something going on here, it's not all like that."
"They were down on that square, today there is a department store there, so they were on that square. People with the help of the wrong signs herded them up that 5. května Street to that square in front of that town hall. That square is quite small, and the tanker can see, I don't know, ten or fifteen meters in front of him, he can't see what's in front of the tank. And as these people herded him there and he needed to turn around, he wanted to turn around and unfortunately, he just hit the two columns there. But then it turned around again, nobody admitted anymore that those people actually chased him there with those wrong signs. And it's true that we turned the signs around. Just so that they couldn't get to Prague, so when there was Prague on a sign, it was thrown somewhere in the fields or turned around, so that they just couldn't find Prague or something, because they didn't orient themselves, they didn't know. And that's just what the Liberec people did to themselves, and nobody admitted to it. And there were a lot of people in that square who... It just happened."
"Nobody forced us to be in the Communist Party. I was never in it, and since I'm the kind of person who always spoke my mind, even though I had a lot of trouble with it, my life was like a seesaw. I always got to the top and then I was sent down because I spoke my mind." – "The party sent you up and down?" – "Not the party. The people who worked in it. That's a distinction to be made. Take for example: when I was finishing college, three months before graduation they announced that we were going to take a state exam in Marxism-Leninism. We had no idea. Well, the last time, we had lectures on it, was sometime in our freshman year, so it was quite a shock. Anyway, we made it. I finished school and the only thing I got a B in was Marxism-Leninism. According to college law, I should have gotten a degree after graduation because I graduated with honours. I graduated with a red diploma. But they said: 'No way, you finished, you got a B in Marxism-Leninism, so there will be no degree.' And I got it only after the revolution."
"I, as the group leader, had to attend a training session, and the training session took place again in Seč. And now we are back in Seč. So, I went to Seč. At that time, I had already passed some of the highest exams of a pioneer worker. I had worked in the organization for a long time, since I was fifteen years old as a group leader. I had quite a lot of experience. I had been an instructor since I was seventeen, when we trained for summer camps. I was one of the few people there who got straight A's on the tests, so they asked me whether I would like to work there. I went back home, I already had my boyfriend there at the time, so we made a deal, got married and a week after the wedding we moved to Seč. I was nineteen at the time and we moved there because the job in Seč in that Czechoslovak Pioneer Camp was a prestigious job. Only few people were able to get there. It was a kind of honour for everybody, meaning for people who worked in that area of the Pioneer organization. There were at that time - Czechoslovak Pioneer Camp was the name of that facility - so there were about eighty workers there at that time. There were exactly half Czechs, half Slovaks, and you really went there to work as a reward."
Full recordings
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Základní škola Bratranců Veverkových v Pardubicích, 19.06.2019
Alena Mašková, née Babicová, was born on 5 July 1955 in Liberec and spent the first nine years of her life in nearby Vratislavice nad Nisou. Her parents divorced when she was one year old. She had virtually no contact with her father Emil Babic, who emigrated to Australia via Austria in 1969. Throughout her life, she competed in sports - athletics, gymnastics, volleyball, swimming, etc., but above all in field hockey, in which she played in the first league and was also a junior representative. From the age of nine she lived in České Budějovice, where she finished primary school with excellent grades and graduated from the grammar school. Especially thanks to sports she became a member of the Pioneer movement at the age of 12. From the age of 15, she was a functionary in various posts of the Pioneer movement and participated mainly as a leader of various international pioneer camps. In 1975 she married Rudolf Mašek, with whom she had three daughters. They moved together to Seč, where they both accepted a position at the Institute of the Pioneer Organization of the SSM (Czechoslovak Socialist Youth Union) and worked there mainly as leaders of the International Peace Camps. At the same time, she began a distance study at the Faculty of Education in Hradec Králové, specializing in leisure activities with a focus on physical education. After 1990, she worked in the successor organization of the Institute of the Pioneer Organization of the SSM - Junior Centrum Seč. First, she continued there as a camp leader, later as a business manager and finally, since 2000, as its general director. She later had to leave this position after clashes with her superiors and was subsequently prosecuted in the courts, but was never convicted. She was a member of the Czech Social Democratic Party and for several years a member of the party’s central board. Until 2015, she worked in various positions in the social field and as an official of the Social Department of the Regional Office of the Pardubice Region. After retirement she became a professional foster mother.
International meeting of young educators in Poland, Alena Mašková (seated third from the right) in the costume of Polish harcers (Polish analogue to scouts), 1972
International meeting of young educators in Poland, Alena Mašková (seated third from the right) in the costume of Polish harcers (Polish analogue to scouts), 1972
