Alfréd Schubert

* 1940

  • “All four of us arrived by bus to the Black Sea, to Burgas, which was crowded with tourists. We didn’t like there one bit. We decided to have a look further south, we found on the map that there aren’t any summer resorts there, but mountains instead. We hitched a ride to a village which was still quite a long way from the Turkish border. We met up and went to the local shop to buy some food before setting off into the mountains. We did our shopping, but there was no going outside. The door was locked, and the locals had already called the police that there were suspicious foreigners there. I guess the border guards there had their informers just like our ones did. They started asking us what we were looking for, why weren’t we on the beaches by the sea like all the other tourists, why were we headed in the direction of Turkey - and they insinuated that we had wanted to cross the border. They took us back to Burgas, where they kept us at the police station and gradually took for questioning one by one. We each had to say separately where we’d come from, who we’d come with, why we’d been going to the mountains by the Turkish border, if we hadn’t wanted to go to Turkey, and so on. We sat in an inhospitable room for a long time, with various Communist posters around us. Perhaps we had some food to eat, but we certainly didn’t feel comfortable there. In the end they told us we would be deported from Bulgaria.”

  • “You couldn’t just go travel wherever you wanted to, not even to the Soviet Union, only with the national travel agency, Čedok. In 1973 a close friend of mine was travelling around Ukraine with Cirkus Praga. He worked as a roustabout, which is the name for those who build the circus tent and help during the show. He sent me an invitation, it was false again, he had to lie that I was his cousin. I joined him in the city of Chernivtsi. I liked the circus, I didn’t want to go home after just a week. The boys from the circus knew a nurse at the hospital. She took a sheet of headed paper, wrote I had pneumonia, borrowed a stamp and added an illegible signature to it. I wrote to my work place in Prague that I had fallen ill and I would return as soon as I recovered. I stayed with the circus a whole month, I made friends with a bunch of roustabouts, I helped put the bars up when the tigers were to be on show, to lay out the carpets or put down the floorboards for the artistic cyclists.”

  • “One day Jack hinted mysteriously that he had something very interesting for me. I had to promise him I wouldn’t tell a word to anyone. When I promised that and we shook hands, he told me to come to Peace Square on Thursday, that he’d take me somewhere. We went to the number sixteen [tram] terminus at Zlíchov, where they still have a shipyard to this day. Back then the sign still read Sokol Shipyard, but soon afterwards it was renamed to SU [sports union] Stalingrad. We crossed over a small bridge and entered a wooden building. There were all sorts of boats on the ground floor and club rooms on the first floor. I suddenly found myself at the meeting of a Scout troop, which something amazing to me, I couldn’t imagine that there were still some Scout troops in existence. I had read about them in books, but I hadn’t dared dream that I myself could belong to a Scout troop. Jack introduced me, saying I was his good friend. It was a water troop, and so he presented me to the captain, who was nicknamed Windy. His name was Karel Vinecký. I don’t remember how Windy [used to] start the meeting, he would usually recall the anniversary of some interesting event. Then we played various Scout games, we learnt the Scout Law, and prepared for expeditions. When it was said there’d be an expedition, say he’d only signal by Morse code where we’d meet up. It was somehow understood as a matter of course that we mustn’t speak about it anywhere. It was taken for granted, that’s how much Windy trusted us. I think he didn’t even emphasise much that the activity was illegal.”

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    Praha, 01.10.2014

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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I’m thankful for not being bored, thankful for every day

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Alfréd Schubert was born on 30 July 1940 in Prague. His German father was captured in the war and later stayed in West Germany. He only met his son once. Because of him, the regime did not allow the witness to enter the Pioneer children‘s organisation, and later it caused his university application to be refused. He was a member of an illegal Scout troop in the 1950s, after its leaders were arrested he tried to help lead several Prague troops. He started tramping in the 1960s - something he continues to do. He lived an adventurous life, he journeyed around western and eastern Europe with false documents, he worked in a circus in Russia and took trips to the guarded border zones. As a heritage worker he tried to stop the insensitive reconstruction of monuments; he still works in the heritage office. He has a wife and a son called Alfréd.