“Camp Eliáš was 900 meters above the sea level. The conditions were terrible. The winters were very severe, as you could expect in the Krušné Mountains. We lived in wooden barracks and showered only in cold water. Our doctor, who was German, had no medication. When someone complained about an illness he would prescribe him only aspirin. For injuries he just gave us soap and sent us to wash the wound with it. There was no chance to get our teeth fixed. The food was very poor, we didn’t have a lot of bread there and the labor was very hard, under the ground as well as above.”
“After the coup in February 1948 our Scout group in Ostrov agreed that we would fight against the Communist regime. We decided to print flyers. I owned a mimeograph and a typewriter. At the beginning we would just make up our own texts and later we multiplied flyers we had gotten from others.”
Kamil Růžička (scout name Heřmánek) was born on November 23, 1919, in Veselý Kopec nearby Chrudim. That‘s also where he joined the Scouts in 1931. Between 1939-1945 he was a member of the scout resistance movement and after the war he founded a scout group in Ostrov nad Ohří. He was among those scouts who printed anti-communist flyers after the February 1948 coup and for this activity, he was imprisoned in the labor camp Eliáš in Jáchymov for three years in 1949. Kamil Růžička actively participated in the restoration of the Scout movement in 1968 and subsequently in 1989 as well. He is a holder of an important award of honor - the Silver syrinx. He is a member of Svojsík‘s troop.
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