Zdeněk Navrátil

"Junácký manifest, to bylo po vzoru Marxe, který vydal komunistický manifest. Tam chtěli ten náš skauting stáhnout doleva. Dokonce přepracovali náš skautský zákon, to skautské desatero, na takové, že takové snad neměli ani ruští pionýři. Na Junácký manifest reagoval vůdce ivančického prvního oddílu Ervín Loprais. Sepsal protiklad, ten nazval skautský manifest, kterým se vracel k původnímu zakladateli Paulovi, včetně těch tří základních principů, o kterých jsem hovořil, včetně zdůraznění skautského zákona. Měl probíhat sněm 26. února 1948 ve Zlíně. Na programu bylo přerušení jednání se svazem mládeže a také tam chtěl Ervín projednat ten svůj skautský manifest. Sněm už se ale kvůli únoru 48 nekonal. Ervín se snažil manifest rozšířit, ale už se mu to nepodařilo. Využil pak možnosti a emigroval. Dostal se až do Spojených států a spoustě lidí pomohl, byl činný v našem zahraničním skautingu."

"U nás měla NSDAP sekretariát. Takže tam byla německá skupina. Ale vše je v lidech. Byli tam Němci jako starousedlíci. Čili to byli českoslovenští občané německé národnosti, tak jako byla většina obyvatel Sudet. A byli to lidé, se kterými jsme se sžili, to se nerozlišovalo. Vím, že u nás je velká nemocnice, a za války tam měl primář Berka schovaného zraněného partyzána, a věděl o tom i německý správce nemocnice, a neudalo ho. Bohužel po válce si ty gardy shromáždili všechny Němce. Ženy německé byly internované v místní orlovně. Podle některých tam dostávaly "pánské návštěvy". Nevím, co je na tom pravdy, protože to šlo mimo nás děti, rodiče nám o takových věcech neříkali. No a některé Němce tam skutečně postříleli."

“It is true that they caught the Germans and put them to prison. There used to be a district court here and a court jail adjacent to it. German women were assembled in the Orlovna gym. People rumoured that theirs was really not a good fate – that they were being visited regularly there. The prison I mentioned was located next to the backyard of my grandma’s house and when we were at my grandma’s we could hear beating and the crying of those who were being tortured... We could hear the shouting: ‘You murderer, you murderer,’ and we, as boys, really did not feel well about it. A situation which we probably cannot be proud of took place here. They picked up about seventeen Germans whom they needed to get rid of. I remember that I saw them leading the German men somewhere and then they shot them to death behind the brick factory and they buried them in the field. It was rumoured that among them there were some people who knew some compromising information and therefore they needed to get rid of them.”

“It was a water sports club. We have three rivers here. They built a dock by the Jihlavka River near Ivančice to serve as their base. They worked on it all by themselves, and part of the construction material was donated to them. But they had bad luck. UNRRA was still functioning at that time and in 1948 the Youth Union took hold of everything, including the Boy Scout organization. It was a communist organization and they liked the dock immensely. But the guys from the water sports club said that they would not surrender the dock to them, because they had built it by themselves and it did not belong to the Boys Scouts. But the Youth Union officials argued that UNRRA material had been used during the construction. The water sports club guys thus said fine, they would give them the building material, but not their labour. What they did was that at night they disassembled the whole building of the dock and they placed all the wooden planks in neat piles and surrendered it to the Youth Union like that. Today, one would just call it a boys’ prank, but at that time it was a big scandal. They were tried at court for it. Fortunately, they worst sentence they got was only a suspended sentence.”

“It was the political screening in 1958. They said that the administration department needed to be purged of antagonist elements. However, the true reason behind it was more practical. Since February 1948, dyed-in-the-wool communists infiltrated all offices. Often, they were shoemakers, bakers - they might be skilful craftsmen, certainly - but they were not able to make decisions about things that they absolutely did not know anything about, about things from an entirely different field of expertise, for instance. The administration personnel thus increased enormously. It was therefore necessary to reduce the number of staff a bit. But of course, those bakers were not let go – those who were laid off were the politically unreliable. Well, and since these things had been in my file and had been trailing behind me, I did pass the first round of the screenings, but I was warned and admonished. They reprimanded me for all kinds of things, they criticized me for my involvement with the Boys Scouts, with the disassembled dock house, and when I showed the personnel officer my clean criminal record, he told me: ‘I trust you that you had not been there and that you had not known about it, but honestly, if you had known about it, you would have gone there to disassemble the dock as well, right? Get out of here!’ And so I was fired. I was fired and ordered to do manual jobs. I tried to defend myself with my job placement notice, which was still valid, and I argued that they could not fire me. But the personnel officer told me: ‘It is very simple: We will charge you with the loss of trust and in that case we can fire you on the spot, but when we record the loss of trust in your file, you will then not find any other job anywhere.’”