Jaromír Prach

“We went to the Sázava river where we came to a campfire. There, we cooked dinner and in the morning, as we were waking up, there was some crazy boy who called himself Sheriff Pedro. He began kicking us and saying: ‘Get up, bears, get up – the Russians have invaded us!’ We replied: ‘Pedro, shut up! Please, don’t do such comedy here.’ He said: ‘Really! No kidding, the Russians have invaded us!’ Now, as we saw all the other boys packing up – there were multiple camps – we packed up as well and began leaving for home. At one point, we arrived to a cottage area where we could hear the emotional voices. In the radio, they spoke about a shootout at the Czechoslovak Radio building, about people dying… The cottage people were listening to the radio, also packing up and leaving. We were left dumbfounded. I was there in my military uniform, so I told a guy: ‘You know what?’ – he had a sort of a fire brigade suit – ‘Give me this suit and take my green one. I have to go to my unit in case something was happening there.’ I was practically at a vacation there. On the way home, we were really meeting Russian tanks passing by. We had to take a detour all the way around Tábor. I only came with one friend who joined me; all the others insisted they’d go through Prague, wanting to see what was happening. I told them: ‘Guys, don’t be stupid, don’t go there – you can hear that there’s a shootout.’ – ‘No, no, we want to see for ourselves!’”

“The camp was built the same way as before. Once again, we had a green gate, a watchtower – all of that was identical. The campfire circle, chairs, totems… And then again, there was an issue with the totems. We weren’t allowed to make totems. Once again, knowing there’d be inspections, we decided to use driftwood instead of totems: ‘Find a piece of wood with two horns, make a goat out of it, color it a bit, and that’s that…’ The inspection came over: ‘How come you have totems here?’ – ‘These are not totems, these are pieces of driftwood – it’s fine art produced by the kids!’ There were ways around everything. I was already telling the taxi driver who brought me here before that I like to call it VSNKZ – having the cake and eating it.”