Radomil Raja

„The Scout movement was a nuisance for all of the totalitarian regimes that were here, it was even dangerous for them. These were altogether young people that the potentates understandably had no use for. That explains why the regime was so resolved to eliminate the movement. So they started at that time with the Union of the Youth and the “Pioneer movement” as a counter movement to Scouting and, of course, there was the property of the Scouts, which they had a hard time putting together.“

Anti-state groups, as they called them, began to form those days and when there was just none of these groups around, they could easily create one with the help of decoy agents. Of course, all these secret repressive state forces need to justify their existence by showing how important and active their work is for the state’s security and existence. They do so by demonstrating some activity. The flow of money into their organization depends on it. That was exactly our case. A lot of “movements” or “groups” were “created” by secret state agents “provocateurs” and that was our case as well.

„So they had a shrewd plan really, to make sure that no one would think later on this could have been organized beforehand. Therefore this Slovak came to our camp and told us he was searching for his horse. That was, of course, nonsense, the secret agents sent him. I and a friend of mine walked him out of the forest. So now they had the pretext that this guy told them about us, which was nonsense because they had perfectly known about us before. So in the morning, after three hours, they surrounded the camp when it was still dark. They received the order to open fire at dawn, when they would see the outlines of the tents – to open fire and wipe us out.”

„The grave digger there (in Hejnice, note of the editor) was a German, such a decent man, an elderly gentleman. They were stripped naked. He refused to bury them like this, he said that even during the war people weren’t buried like this, so they had to cover them up with something and then they dug them into the ground at the Hejnice graveyard like dogs. He was forced to sign a secrecy statement, so he’d tell nobody, but as he was a decent man he told us. After 1990 they exhumed the bodies so at least their remains could rest in the graves of their parents. The biggest tragedy about it besides the loss of their lives? As they weren’t sentenced, they couldn’t be rehabilitated and so neither did anybody apologize to their families.”

„So the idea after February was to somehow take over the Scout movement and incorporate it into the Union of the Youth. But no scout would become a member of the Union, except for a few individuals. It was clear that they needed to intervene drastically. They had this slogan: Making strange heads fall solves problems. That’s how they eliminated the ideas of people, preferably along with their bearers.”

„I was rather lucky because my shoulder joint was shattered and they were trying to put it back together. I had to go through two surgeries. I was partly disabled, so they figured I wouldn’t be much of a working force. The penalty therefore wasn’t that high. Pepík Veselý, Jindra Kokoška, they got double my sentence – four, six years.“