Miloš Miltner

“We arrived to Switzerland and I met a colleague there with whom I had been working for sixteen years and his sister was living there. We thus stopped by for a visit and we decided that we would stay there. We got a three bedroom apartment, and I began working as a maintenance worker in the company Kabelwerke in Brugg. It was funny, we had a three-bedroom apartment and we didn’t have anything. We had a three-piece mess-tin, and we ate from that – three people. We had a big paper box, which served as a table, and we slept on inflatable mattresses. I was out of luck, because my mattress had a hole in it, and in the mornings I would always wake up lying on the wooden floor.”

“We thus set up the camp, the four eldest boys stayed there and I went back – and the Russians arrived that night. How nice! A Scout camp to be held after many years, and it didn’t happen, because the Russians arrived to Prague. Their parents came and they were asking me: ‘Where are the children, where are the oldest ones?’ ‘They are there.’ Oh my God! I thus got into my Trabant car and I went there. They did not let me drive where I wanted to go. I thus had to drive around through the forest but eventually I reached the place, and we raised the Scout flag on the flagpole and the eldest boy recited his Scout pledge to me. Then we packed everything and we drove home, we arrived around three o’clock in the morning and the parents were still waiting for. So that was the end of our Scout camp.”

“When the funeral of President Beneš was held, there was a long line of people all the way from the Liberation Monument to the gas storage tank in Libeň. It was horrible, I have never seen anything like that. As boys from Žižkov, we knew that if we took the main street and pass the Baťa shop and climb over the fence there, and jump over the railway track and run up the hill, we would get right under the monument. We thus got there this way, and I went there three or four times. If I had joined the queue somewhere in Ohrada, people would have kicked me out. But since we were already there, they were all sad and quiet and therefore they left us boys alone.”

“We had a meeting of our troop, and two gentlemen and two boys came in and said: ‘Look, boys, go home, because you are no longer Scouts, this is now the Czechoslovak Youth Union.’ We thus dissolved the troop, and we were cursing them, of course, and from time to time we were going tramping, mostly to Jarov. Before I was to go to do my military service, they summoned me to the municipal committee of the Youth Union and told me: ‘Look, comrade, you are going to the army…’ They had written me to bring my ID card and my Union card. I came there and said: ‘I don’t have my ID card, and I don’t have the Union card, either.’ – ‘Why didn’t you bring them, when the notice said that you were supposed to bring these documents?’ – ‘See, I have been a Scout all my life…’ – ‘But you cannot compare the two organizations!’ – ‘Well, I cannot, because I think that for a young man it is more important if he knows how to wash his shirt than if he knows when Lenin was born.’ They kicked me out of the door.”