Vladimír Cvrček

* 1939

  • “My beginnings were like… I enjoy telling it to the young boys. My dad was a scout member in Turnov when he was small. I even found some pictures of him from the 1920s. My brother was also a scout sometime in the years 1938, 1939 and then again during the post-war renewal. I was six years younger. Which meant I was considered small, not ready for scouting. In fact, it was my pig-headedness that got me there. I used to escape home and join the scouts up until my parents came to the understanding that it was better for me to be organized officially than to go there unofficially. So I sulked my scouting out, so to say. But only sometime in 1947.”

  • “So I returned from the first intended – and cancelled – Czechoslovak race of scout cubs. Immediately afterwards we had a meeting of the leadership and we were told that we’d either transfer under the Pionýr or dissolve. All of them said: ‘We’re through with it’, but at the same time told me that I should carry on with the boys. I told them: ‘Well, that’s nice of you to say.’ And I took a few minutes to think it over. But I saw that it’d all get somewhat deformed. So I told them I wouldn’t carry on either. For two years we were meeting literally as beer scouts. That meant meeting at pubs, not to spark attention and not to look like some counter-state grouping. We were considering building a common houseboat but all the time we pondered on ways which would enable us to carry on. Most of the local clubs which got incorporated in the Pionýr ceased to exist within two years.”

  • “Everyone had a different strategy. Two years after the ban, the clubs which survived were naïve enough to think that they weren’t under supervision, and so we wore an anchor at the same place as before. We had our reasons – it is a sailors’ tradition to wear the club insignia at their heart. And so on. We used the complete scout uniform with the exception of the lily badge. We used to go around and say: ‘Yeah, we’re smart, we’re doing all of it.’ The symbolic is significant, in particular among the children, and so whenever possible, we used it. And as soon as we got into a positive light and were able to travel abroad, we went scouting all the way there.”

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    Praha, 24.01.2017

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There is always a way

7060-portrait_present.jpg (historic)
Vladimír Cvrček
zdroj: Dobová: archiv pamětníka, současná: Post Bellum

Vladimír Cvrček, who goes under the scout pseudonym Vezír, was born on 20 April 1939 in Turnov as the younger of two sons of a railway worker František Cvrček and a seamstress Františka Cvrčková. As an eight-year-old he began attending the first sea scout club in Liberec. Following the ban on scouting in 1948 he joined the Pionýr. He graduated from a school of chemical engineering in Liberec and began studying teaching at a university in Ústí nad Labem. Twenty years later, during the second scout renewal he and his friends put together the original club, calling themselves „Proud Lighthouse of Liberec“. Vladimír served as chief of cubs - the young scouts. The first-ever contest of scout cubs was to take place in 1970, and Vladimír was supposed to take part as a referee. However, the race was cancelled at the last minute and scouting was outlawed for the second time. The Liberec center ceased to function. Some of the local groups were incorporated into hiking clubs, others into Pionýr. Two years later, Vladimír‘s cubs reunited again under the flag of TJ Lokomotiva. They carried on even within the Pionýr, up until 1989. Following the Velvet Revolution, they returned to the scout organization. Vladimír remains an active scout chief, serving at Junák‘s headquarters and since 2014 being a member of its country leadership.