“I’m Jiří Materna, born on 12 April, 1932, in Heřmanovice. Our family has been living here since 1754. The number of our house is 8, which is one of the oldest numbers in this settlement. Of course that the numbering was only introduced much later but the building has stood here since the end of the century. That means if the engineers came here in 1842 to record the building into the land registry, the building must have been here for a while and there is some tradition to it. My parents and grandparents originate here. Fridrich Materna, who lives in Germany, counts us among the Maternas from Květnice, a landed-gentry family. I have no idea to what extent he’s right and I’ve never really done my own research on this. The only thing I did was to get the coat-of-arms of the Maternas from Květnice engraved in wood and have it here as a reminder.”
“My son bought a metal detector but he didn’t just want to search for horseshoes and plugs around the pond. He was very enthusiastic about the search and I knew approximately where the things of the K 231 might be hidden, because I went there in the nineties and later. We searched for it with primitive detectors or with sticks like clairvoyants several times in the past but we didn’t find anything. Another thing is that the place has changed a lot throughout the years – forest turning into meadow and vice versa. Therefore it was a bit complicated. So we started to go there to search but it was in vain. We found lots of different stuff but not what we were looking for. It wasn’t until my son found it one evening amidst great cheers. We opened it and found out that it was in perfect condition because it had been superbly crafted. From the beginning it was clear that the only heir can be the successor organization to the K 231 which is the present day KPV. It was a metal box with all sorts of documents like lists of applications, photos from meetings, magazine snippets and the like. These are sensitive documents related to the activities of K 231 that could have been very harmful to us if they had gotten into the hands of the secret police after 1968. Therefore we buried them underground. It was the idea of old Pavlovec who had rich experiences with the processing of metal as he worked in a coffin-production works. He made a perfect metal box, stored it all inside and hid it.”
“We were ten and we were sentenced to 99 years in prison altogether. Five of us, including me, were sentenced to over 15 years. The rest got lower terms due to extenuating circumstances or the fact that they didn’t carry any guns with them. Our sentences were aggravated by the fact that we had guns or that we were found guilty of manipulating with guns. Whoever didn’t own a gun in those years wasn’t even considered to be a true boy.”
“It was a rather large prison cell and the occupants were Šaňo Mach, Gustáv Husák, Áda Petrovskej, Hradeckej, Zbyněk Rouša – they were ‘mašínovci’. I’m ashamed to talk about Husák’s behavior but I can’t really complain about him as we had no quarrels. He was most of all and before all else a Slovak. He was also a Bolshevik but everyone who was a bača (a chief shepherd – note by the translator) or a Slovak was much higher up the chain then any regular member of the central committee.”
“It was taken for granted that we joined in 1945 as the founding members of the pre-war Boy Scout. A lot of people came together in Nová Paka because there was a huge boom of Scouting here. Thanks to the pre-war Scouts we also had a solid material background, for example six chalets that previously belonged to the Germans. We took them apart and assembled them again at our camp underneath the cliffs. That was a very nice base for our Scouting activities. We spent a lot of time there. Our brigade was called ‘Sopka’ (Volcano – note by the translator). The name was derived from the nearby Volcano and also from the vigor which was omnipresent after 1945.”
“Well, there was simply a demand for action. I was lucky to have that friend Salivar who was a brother-in-law of Škvorecký. Therefore I could be useful by hiding manuscripts or microfilms at my place after he left. I met Salivar while I did my compulsory military training. He was also shortly in Leopoldov but the fortresses are simply a story of their own. We knew all sorts of things about each other but there was no way to contact the other. It wasn’t possible, not even through Krbec in the medical center.”
Jiří Materna was born on 12 April, 1932, in the village of Heřmanice near Nová Paka. His father Eduard Materna was a construction engineer and later an urban farmer. His mother Anna was taking care of her three sons. Jiří’s studies were complicated by war as he wasn’t able to continue studying during the war. When the war ended, he started a one-year apprenticeship and then studied at a business academy in Hořice. After he graduated from the academy, he started to work for the state construction works in Hradec Králové. His biggest passion was the Boy Scout movement. He was a member of the Boy Scout since the war when he and a few of his friends formed an illegal Scouting brigade. He continued in his Boy Scout activities after the war. After the takeover of power by the Communists in February 1948, the Boy Scouts in the Nová Paka region helped a local anti-Communist military group - they disseminated leaflets, set up their own radio and were involved in other activities as well. They were, however, being followed by the secret state police.
Jiří Materna and his friends from the Boy Scout were arrested on 5 June, 1954. This was when he did his compulsory military service. During the detention period Jiří Materna experienced harsh treatment as he was repeatedly tied to a chair or starved for prolonged periods of time. The investigators aimed at getting the young scouts to confess that they were directed by the Boy Scout Center but failed in their effort. The whole group of Boy Scouts, consisting of 10 accused, was therefore labeled as ‘Nezdařil and Company’. The trial was held in Prague and the prosecutor demanded four death sentences. Eventually, due to their teen age bordering on juvenility, they were sentenced to long prison terms. Jiří Materna was sentenced to 15 years in jail. He was transferred from Mírov to Pankrác, where he was placed into military isolation. Gradually, he joined the clerics that served their term in prison. He was later transferred again, this time to Leopoldov, where he managed to join a hunger strike (the so-called ‘noodle strike’). He also witnessed a couple of attempted escapes, most notoriously by his inmate Áda Petrovský. In prison, he also met many outstanding personalities like, for example, Šaňo Mach or Gustáv Husák. His time in prison ended with the so-called ‘May amnesty’ in 1960.
After his release from prison, it was, of course, very hard for him to find a job but due to help from his friends, he was admitted to the state-owned construction works. He studied an evening school of industry while working there. After a while, he was also called upon to complete his military service which he did in the auxiliary battalions of the Czechoslovak national army. His life was profoundly changed in 1968 when he became active again. Although he didn’t believe in the transformative process taking place in the Communist party, he nevertheless used the opportunity to renew his Boy Scout group and activities and to take part in the newly created ‘Club K 231’. At that time he had already been married for some time and gradually he became the father of two sons. The coming of the so-called ‘Normalisation’ wasn’t perceived by the former inmate too painfully and he was mostly absorbed by his family affairs. However, his new life wasn’t equal to resignation. He was friends with the brother in law of Josef Škvorecký, Salivar. He was helping Salivar by hiding his illegal manuscripts and microfilms at his place. Jiří Materna perceived the revolution of 1989 and related events with a certain skepticism due to his experiences with the year 1968. But he accepted an invitation by the Škvorecký family to visit them in Toronto for six weeks. After his return to then Czechoslovakia he contributed to the renewal of the Boy Scout organization in the country and to this day he’s going to Boy Scout summer camps. He was one of those who initiated the founding of the brigade of honor of Velen Fanderlík. He also became an active member of the local Confederation of Political Prisoners (KPV) in Nová Paka. His son managed to find a valuable archive of the Club K 231 in Nová Paka in 2008. He died on August 30, 2010.
