“We also played a great game during that camp. We had different tasks every day – who would be the fastest one to burn a thread, to make a fireplace… and one task consisted in getting over a pond on a raft, which the patrols were supposed to build by themselves. Now, Ivo had a good idea with this game, but the children didn’t make it that well. They took wrong parts, even though they were marked... But the greatest mistake was that they were rushing and they didn’t tie the raft’s components properly. Which meant that as soon as one member of a patrol – there was always one from each team – got on the raft, the parts started disassembling. There were several rafts on the pond, one for each patrol, and the children began falling down, sliding down, or a raft got stuck in mud… Those of us who were watching them from the shore, especially the head leaders, were killing ourselves with laughter. That was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. There was sister Kudrlinka, and she had a new swimsuit, and she was shouting: ´No, no, I’m not going on that raft, I got a new swimsuit.´ But her patrol told her: ´Come on, Kudr, you are the shortest one and the lightest one of us, you got to go!´ and she jumped onto the raft, and at that moment her leg fell in between the raft parts and her leg got covered with mud, and so were her arms, her swimsuit, then she got out and mud was just dripping from her. Well, it was a wonderful game.”
“Only now we can learn how many scouts had been imprisoned and executed. In 1950 they executed brother Plešmíd, he was from the 24th, and artillery captain, with decorations, he was fighting all the time throughout the war. And in 1950 they said – he had a photo camera with him, he was a spy. The communists could make up anything…”
“The year after we went on a long trip, we went boating on Slovak rivers, on the Hron. We spent two weeks on the Hron. At that time, the nature there was intact, and these two weeks were great. There were meadows around, and clean water… Our group resembled a large fleet – a number of canoes, and also rubber dinghies. We valued and loved our dinghies, because you could cook on them, sleep on them, write chronicles, box and fight, dive from them, turn them around to make an arena… I wrote an article about it. At that time I was contributing to the magazine Travelling Tourist, which was edited by our oldscout, brother Sopka, or Jiří Dvořák, the one who founded Junák in Kobylisy. That’s where our cooperation started, and the article ´In praise of rubber dinghies´ also originated there.”
“I already mentioned that scouting is a philosophy, and I am happy that I got among the scouts, because scouting taught me this sincere attitude to life, with focus on nature conservation, protection of the weak, humanism, democracy, the right of all people to freedom... And it gave me many friends, and some older ones, too – among others sister Koseová, Macková (we are still together in Svojsík’s troop), sister Páleníková, she was an enthusiast and courageous waterscout, sister Karla Lebedová – also from the officials and instructors, but I also have a number of younger friends, whom I value the same way as I do my older sisters...”
“The government delegation arrived. We went to welcome our soldiers, then the airmen – it was all so beautiful, we borrowed folk costumes for that… Even if a family was poor, everyone found money for a folk costume or their mothers gave them some, and we went to rent one, and we went there to welcome them. I still remember it vividly, I was standing on the Huss monument, and Beneš was riding by in a car along the Old Townhall, the one which had burnt down, but we still remember how it looked like.”
“When the Germans came I was attending the second grade. I remember that my mom cried when they arrived to Prague. Our mom was brave, in times when the house was being paid for, and the apartment was not here, it took us a long time to get here, and there were troubles with it. My parents let one room to a woman who had fled from Carpathian Ruthenia. We couldn’t get in there afterwards. Only in 1960 – imagine that, the war began in 1939, did my parents get the room back. These were small things, but still, they did affect our family. There was no coal, we were using whatever we could for heating; we were collecting spikelets to make dumplings from them, we would remove the husks and then grind the grains in a grinder at home. These dumplings looked like these Hussite flails, they scratched your throat. But we were happy to have something to eat. And instead of butter we used a strange substance, it was called Hitler’s grease, and it looked like a cross between honey and fat. We can’t even imagine this today.”
“I was a keen scout from my first day. I loved drawing my journal, pictures for the chronicle, singing songs, Cajdík was teaching me to play the guitar – my husband’s scout name was Cajdík – and I was simply enthusiastic in all respects.”
"Well, we say: Love your country, the Czechoslovak Republic, so actually everything is said there. As I said: our boys saved the forest once. We have a medal for that. The forest was burning up in the Sázava when the camp was there. There was Eda Pachman, the assistant professor of chemistry. So they put out the fire and we got a medal for that. There are other events. We used to go to voluntary jobs all the time, for example I have photos from the year when Zdenička was fifteen, that means it was '62. No wait, it was '72. We helped in a forest. Or I signed up to... There was this thing to help, you know, and collect hours. But it was all normal for us. And a good deed every day. I often do a good deed by calling someone. You know, it often happened to me that while I was walking that I would meet young people and they would smile at me, and I would say, 'Oh, a good deed'."
"My husband, he was always so careful about his stomach, but he had always a supply of lard with him, which we cooked at home, and when we went across the Low Tatra and someone got hungry, Jara would offer them lard, bread was always there. So all the way from Strečno to Prague he was spreading lard on bread for all the teams, because we were divided into green, blue and puppies. Three teams. He was always spreading the lard on bread for the whole train. He was also a very enthusiastic scout. Yeah, he was, but he was also very hardworking. He was doing things in that scout group that very few people would have done. He carried tents in his arms to re-impregnate them for us. That way we could live somewhere, we didn't have tents, we didn't have anything. Everything was old and weathered. He always cared. I was the leader, but we always discussed things together, he arranged everything or helped otherwise. Then the travelling to Romania started. He figured out that Romania would be the easiest water. So we started going there. Three times to Romania, then the Hron, Slovak rivers, the Bela was a wild river that didn't have its own flow, so you didn't know where it would go. Especially, I started at the age of 40 and that was pretty hard on the water because Romania had hard rivers. So once, we turned around four times."
Zdenka Wittmayerová, née Bidařová, was born on 30 July 1931 in Prague. In 1946 the family moved to Čimický háj, where she met the love of her life - Jaroslav (Cajdík by his scout name), who invited her to join the scout group. For twenty-five years she worked as a teacher of chemistry, sports and arts. Then due to considerable exhaustion she switched to a quieter job in an analytical laboratory. She left Scouting in 1948 and did not return to it until after the regime eased in 1968. After the third ban on Scouting in 1970, she founded a girls’ tourist group specializing in water sports, which she led for two years. She rafted Czechoslovak, Polish, East German and Romanian rivers with the group. She then quit these activities and eventually returned to scouting again after 1989, when she was helping with the restoration of Junák (Czech scouting organization). She served as a communication officer for Old scouts and as an instructor in leaders’ examinations for sports and physical training. She is a member of the Prague patrol of Svojsík’s group.
Zdenka, standing third from the right, and Jaroslav Wittmayer, standing first from the right, 80th anniversary of the founding of the Centre 24 Sever, 2000
Zdenka, standing third from the right, and Jaroslav Wittmayer, standing first from the right, 80th anniversary of the founding of the Centre 24 Sever, 2000
