Leonid Křížek

"And we said on the wiretap during the separation, why should we listen to the Americans when the Soviet Union invades us. So we protested quite spontaneously. And surprisingly the officers said, 'Well, okay, you're right, so we'll listen to the Warsaw Pact.' So we changed the frequency, we were listening to the Soviet troops, because most of us knew Russian, the Poles, or the guys from Silesia, said they knew Polish, the guys from the Sudetenland said they knew German, so they listened to the Germans, and the Gypsies - the patriots, so they listened to the Hungarians. So we had all those armies under control for about a fortnight before someone thought we were committing treason or something. So it was abolished, and the officers who ordered it or allowed it, they arrested some of them, threw the others out of the army, and told us, 'You were here doing resistance against the Warsaw Pact, you will go on exercises when you turn black.' Which they did, I was on military exercises about eight times. So don't forget comrades, and strike back, strike back mercilessly."

"This uncle of mine was a scoutmaster until 1949. So I got a lot of magazines from him - Junák, Český skaut, Forward, Mladý hlasatel and Rychlé šípy, so at the right age I came across this phenomenon, Rychlé šípy and scouting. And I kept asking my parents and uncles why Scout didn't exist anymore, so they weren't able to explain it to me, I made them nervous. So I got a whiff of that anti-communist ideology there, because by the end, in that year 1948 to 1949, you could already see in those magazines that something was happening, that it was all going to end, that they were making scams, that the organization was probably going to be abolished. So I got this impression of the situation that those parents never wanted to talk about. Either because they were afraid or because they thought I was too young. So one day at home, during some discussion, I said that the communists had abolished scouting and that they were putting people in dungeons and that they were bastards, and my parents were absolutely horrified as to where a ten-year-old kid was getting that from, so they just begged me not to say it at school. I survived that time unscathed."