Karel Pašek

"And then it was over. We had one last campfire in 1970, sometime in the middle of September, and it was at Klamínky in a little valley. That's where we decided as a group what we were going to do. Because there were several options. That group could have gone over to the Pioneer, which we didn't want to do, but some groups did. Or it could have gone over to Sokols, or the rowers, or just some of these organizations, or it could have quit altogether. And we quit, we just said we didn't want to go to the Pioneers, and to go rowing here in the club, we didn't really want that either, so we quit actually. And at the place of that last camp in 1970, which is near Prosečnice, we meet. The guys that were there at that camp, we go to that place every year during camp time. Last year was the 53rd reunion, we've been there fifty-three times. Now we even go there in the winter, on a winter trip, but this is always in the summer that we get together."

"We went there via Austria, which was very interesting because we saw for the first time what it looks like in the West. And I remember when we went down this narrow street and there was a candy shop, and then a little shop, and it said, "Austrian Communist Party. And it was like modest, not much, and our father said, 'This is what it should look like. Communists, it can't be helped, but they should just be modest'. We got to Yugoslavia and we had a bath there and everything was fine and we went back through Hungary. And when we got to the Hungarian border, we saw a lot of soldiers at the border. There were columns, trucks, tanks. We came here, to Zbraslav, my parents went to work, took me to my grandmother in Mělník, and two days later the Russians came."