Róbert Schmidt

´I had a friend who was an organized tramp. His name was Rasťo Havalda, he is no longer alive. Rasťo had a tramp nickname "Frankie" and I think in the second year of grammar school he wrote to Radio Free Europe - RFE, asking them to play him a song - Karel Kryl was leading a music show there at that time. He signed only with that tramp nickname. They came upon him very quickly, they had snoopers among them. After that, members of state security came to his house and found a lot of tapes with recordings, which they deleted. By the way, his father was a professor. In the end, he was not kicked out of the grammar school, supposedly for health reasons, but he had a lot of problems because of it. Then I had a classmate in college who also had a similar experience. This is how they caught the entire network of people who had banned Karel Kryl's recordings. It was not allowed to spread it among the younger generation, you could only get to it through Radio Free Europe or from old LP records. At that time there was such a thing as forbidden music, which is unimaginable today, so Rasťo was such a rioter in this.´

´Several of us got the idea then, and I was probably the initiator of it, that we would do mapping, documentation and categorization of landfills. We didn't want to interfere with industrial landfills, it was about the waste that people throw away - every village had a dump practically anywhere. We prepared it as an organization of SZOPK and with its wider base, with the fact that we have the people to do it and we will look for ways to dispose of the landfills. But we also need the support of the authorities to prevent this from happening again. I developed the entire questionnaire, we managed to get maps, which was not easy at that time, because maps were not readily available to people, especially detailed ones - we had a scale of 1:50,000. A lady from the SZOPK district committee also helped us with this, who wished us very well in this matter. She arranged for us to reproduce the questionnaires, which was not commonly available at that time. I had a whole bunch of it after that. We copied the maps, prepared sets for grassroots organizations with instructions on how to map it, and then they summoned our district secretary to the party committee. When my friend and I visited him the next day, he was cleaning the office in only his shorts and told us that he did not want us to hear what he heard at the committee, and that we should get rid of it as soon as possible. We didn't understand why at that time, but we couldn't do anything about it. It wasn't so much about what we wanted to do, but the main problem was that we wanted to organize something without them.´

´At first the grandfather did not want to wear the armband because he did not consider himself German. They forced him. As he was not an anti-fascist, he did not wear an anti-fascist armband – back then it was white and yellow armbands. Otherwise, they also had to sew these armbands at home. After some time, they did not give him food rations under the ticket system. At that time, they were supplied by their grandmother's brother, General Emil Perko, who sent them packages. At that time, he tried very hard to help them even on the official side. After all, after the war it was someone in Slovakia. Grandfather also had to go to forced labor, but he somehow survived. It wasn't so bad for him because he was taught to work physically even though he was intelligent. However, they had the worst memory of the Red Guards. That's what my grandmother told me, how at that time youth with armbands walked around German apartments with a basket and collected gold and jewelry, because the Germans had to hand over all their valuables. The approach to the Germans changed when the Americans left and were replaced by Czechoslovak soldiers. The Germans could no longer get anything, they were just bullied and persecuted. Grandfather, for example, mentioned how American soldiers used to take white tapes off the shoulders of German girls in the evening and go dancing with them. At that time it was forbidden to fraternize with Germans. It was mainly a German town, but Czechs also lived there, so no one could blame them. No one could prove it to them either, because they were the masters there. But then the situation changed.'