“My dad was imprisoned as well, in the early 1960s. It was because of pamphlets. He wrote a letter to Prague to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He was a staunch opponent of the communists, and he was thus imprisoned for year and a half. He was in the prison in Bory, and when he came back, we could no longer talk to him. He was out of his mind. I was then coming to visit him to the asylum in Opava, and these things are hard, when you see a man who is over sixty, and who does not know whom he is talking to.”
“Then the long wait began. We kept waiting for the trial for one and a half years. Those months were terrible. I was already at home after my release, but the boys were still there for a longer time. They were looking for weapons, but I could not see any connection with Scouting; I was not interested in weapons at all, and I did not understand how it could be related to Scouting.”
“The worst thing was that my dad lost his job. He was a policeman, and the policemen had some kind of a provision in their work contract, that if something happened and somebody in their family would be accused of something, they would have to leave the police corps. It has cost him his profession… But he has never blamed me for that.”
Marie Štěpánková-Mea was born in 1929 in the family of policeman František Ambrož. They moved from Jablunkov to Frýdek when she was three years old. Her brother’s name is Miroslav (*1931). Her mother began to suffer from multiple sclerosis already during the war, and Marie was taking care of her. She joined the Scouts after WWII and she became the leader of the 2nd Girl Scout troop “Bees” in Frýdek. They had their first camp in 1947 in Horní Bečva. She also held the position of the leader of the Scout district Frýdek. Marie found her husband among the Scouts - Rudolf Štěpánek-Jestřáb, who came from Klobouky u Brna. On May 20, 1948 she was arrested for dissemination of anti-communist pamphlets as the only woman of those involved. She was eventually released, but she had to await her trial in detention for a long time. In addition, her father was forced to leave the police corps. She left the trial with a suspended sentence. Moreover, in the early 1960s her father was sentenced as well, and after two and a half years in prison he returned home suffering from mental disorders. Marie married in 1952. They had four children: Marie, Vojtěch, Rudolf and Veronika. She was involved in the restoration of the Scouting movement in Frýdek in 1968 as well as after November 1989. Marie was awarded the Order of Scout Gratitude on April 24, 1994. She is a member of the honorary troop of Velen Fanderlik. Her husband Rudolf Štěpánek-Jestřáb died in 2010.
