Ing. Ivo Stehlík

"When we talked to the then head of the Bavarian Forest National Park, Hans Bibelriether, who was a big figure in their nature conservation, he said to us: 'You can't imagine the pressures that were here against the establishment of a national park. All Bavarians are pünktlich. If you don't have your manure cut into cubes, a perfectly whitewashed facade, a perfect roof, and geraniums in the windows, you're a Schweinerei. Now imagine a patch of woodland left to nature to do what it wants, with fallen wood lying around and nobody cleaning it up. It was terrible what people did.‘ I think Bibelriether was right about that, the pressures were enormous. But it's much worse here. There were remnants of the borderlands mixed in here - a type of territory that wasn't in Bavaria. In Bavaria, the border police did go there, but they were employees of a ministry, basically normal policemen. Whereas here there was the Border Guard with all the negatives, with military service, which was done by ordinary guys, with the idea that each border guard would be a communist or a vetted and acceptable person for the party. Some of these people stayed in the border area. To this day, it is a specific feature of Volary, where there was a huge unit of the Border Guard. Most of the officers stayed there, they brought up their children in the same spirit in which they were brought up. Volary is a village very sympathetic to the Communist Party, it was apparent during the last presidential election."

"As we became friends, sooner or later one would come into the crosshairs of the local State Security. Later on, when there was some important anniversary and the dissent was expected to do some protest actions in Prague, they invited us for a chat and told us not to travel anywhere, not to be naughty. Without us knowing it, the revolution was coming by leaps and bounds, but one didn't know that at the time. Sometime in 1989, we held a meeting of Southwest Bohemian independent initiatives at the Klišík's house. On that occasion, Míra Crha, today Bohumil Harmonický, was picked up by the police right in front of our barn while he was pushing a cart in front of him, where he had crates of beer and lemonade to treat the people who would gather at Klišík's house. And it made for a humorous situation. Míra was pushed into the car, but what about the cart? Police cars weren't equipped for that. Suddenly we heard banging on the door. When we opened the door, a policeman in uniform was standing there, pushing the cart in front of him, and he said the memorable words: 'Mr Crha will keep this here.'"