Zdeněk Streubel

“What would I tell them? That they should go into it with the same enthusiasm we did, with that Scout kind of purity, upholding all the Scouting principles and laws, and that they should get to know nature and to enjoy it as we did, because the moments at the Scout camps were the most beautiful we ever experienced. I personally also think fondly of the times with the Young Herald Club, during the war while everything was going bad, we were sitting in our club room and living that wonderful Scouting life. The most beautiful thing is to uphold those Scouting principles, because in this world were people lie to each other so much and do not behave nicely, those Scout ideals are something that should be renewed, that should be upheld.”

“One day some people from the Police town council came to our camp and gave us a couple of pistols or a submachine gun or something. I was surprised they trusted us with it. They said there was a danger of werewolves, they were supposed to be passing through the area, so they wanted us to have a means of defending ourselves. Luckily we didn’t need them at all in the end.”

“I remember a famous sentence of the education minister Zdeněk Nejedlý: ‘I cannot imagine the Czechoslovak youth without Scouts.’ And two months later they banned Scouting.”