Ing. Jiří Svoboda

"The fact is that I actually escaped being in the Youth Union at university or in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia thanks to 1968. But when I was finishing college in 1976, my fellow students wrote to tell me that I did not support party leadership. So from then on it dragged on with me, I had it on my work report, so I only found that out when I got divorced. Of course, the result was that although I was a college graduate, I actually held mostly high school positions on those farms. It wasn't until after 1989 that I got somewhere higher up because I got involved in the Civic Forum and then I worked here as vice-chairman of the NV (National committee) and later as deputy head of the district office."

"This is an Italian war cross from the first war. Supposedly my grandfather was supposed to get it because he was shot in the leg on the Piave. And actually, that's what gave me the impulse to start looking into it. Because, I mean, let me go back to that, when I was a kid, you weren't allowed to talk about the Legionnaires. You already have a little bit of a different history, they teach you, so you know that there were Czechoslovak Legions. And the legions in Russia fought against the Bolsheviks, so you weren't allowed to talk about the legionnaires, but then you weren't allowed to talk about the French legionnaires or the Italian legionnaires. My grandfathers were both Italian legionnaires, and there was actually a kind of, I would say at the beginning, interest in finding out some details. Then I got a little bit more into it, so I started collecting things. And because when you're collecting something, you don't stop at one period. When you consider that there were 20 years between the First and Second World War, which is an awfully short span of life. And so I went from the first world war to the second. And I dealt with the uniforms."