“We continued our activities in the years 1947 to 1949, when they banned Scouting. Our last Scout camp took place in 1949; back then we went to Šumava as a blueberry picking expedition, but we were actually scouting, of course. We had good neighbours there. And every evening, when the lamp shone at the saw mill, smugglers crossed the border, skirting our camp by about fifty metres. It was quite thrilling.”
“As Scouts, we knew Morse code, of course. I’d sit by the wall and tap letters out with my right hand; Jirka Hilmar was in the cell next to me, he’d send it on again. My Scout name was Straw, and one time a message came: ‘Straw has a daughter!’”
“Late one Saturday policemen came, they asked the leader, whither Nýdrle - he’ll come with us, his freedom’s gone. And so it was, the stetsecs took me, plumped in the car, then out in Pilsen, into a cell, the sermons began. Early next morning, young man, off in a Tatraplan. And so they took me through dear old Prague to Liberec, that region of wonders. The Liberec Prison kept me two months inside her, in a small little cell, not a healthy provider.”
Jiří Nýdrle was born on 29 December 1932 in Nová Paka. As a boy, he experienced the short-lived renewal of the Czech Scouting Movement after World War II, and he became a Scout heart and soul. In the early 1950s he participated in the activities of a secret Scout group. In 1954 he was arrested by agents of State Security and sentenced to four years of prison in a show trial. However, his good behaviour earned him a reduction of the sentence, which he spent in the labour camps around Jáchymov, and so he was released already in 1956. He then found a job as a tool setter at ZPA. He was a long-serving functionary of the Nová Paka Car Club and chief of the district voluntary fire brigade. He co-organised car and motorcycle races and participated in some of them himself; his work for the car club allowed him to visit Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Soviet Union. He had a fire station and various master-level racing buildings built in Nová Paka. In the early 1990s he participated in the renewal of the local Scout centre. He attended Scout gatherings and meetings of the fire brigade committee. He died on June 2019.
