František Šmajcl

* 1953

  • “We invited local troops from our district and this meeting with Foglar had to take place in the dining room in school at Vrané. We expected about five hundred people to come, and Fíza, whom I mentioned already, made posters for the event, we also made tickets and scores of other promotional materials, Koh-i-noor company did even those special pencils for us, 'Jaroslav Foglar in a Horsecar'. I mean it was quite huge, but someone reported that it was in fact a Boy Scout event. So they warned our friends from tourist clubs that such a thing was inappropriate, as it was somehow connected to the Scout Movement and so on. So less people came and as there was a word that the event was indeed somehow connected to the Scout Movement, many boys came wearing shirts and neckerchiefs. So the Security got involved and we had to go explain ourselves. Well not me, but the head of the club at the Lokomotiva. And we had to change the leader of our troop who, as a well-known Boy Scout, took all the blame.”

  • “They gave us back just two things we bought from grants, a rowing boat and some sort of a cart. And we had this last bonfire and our leader would give a speech, telling us that under such circumstances our troop could no longer function and so he had to resign. And we agreed with him. After that, he spoke with us, the older boys, for quite some time and in the end he made us promise that we would be pushing the cart further as soon as it would be possible.”

  • “As I was part of Arscout, and Fíza, who had been its leading figure here in Budějovice, had been writing this history of Boy Scout forest schools. And because of that – as he died in February 1989, so he didn't live to see the revolution, and we managed to hide his archive – I was sent to this conference on forest schools in Brno as his successor. That was on January 6th 1990. Břetislav Škaroupka Šrám led the conference. I hold him in high regard, as he had been organizing this illegal gathering called Work Meeting Pig (Pracovní setkání prase) frequented by dozens of Boy Scouts, officially an instructional workshop backed by the local tourist clubs. So it was decided that the conference would take place in Brno, and the mood was just great, as everywhere back then. He was the main organiser and everything went just fine, such a great event, the hall was full, until this express train from Prague (Praha) arrived. As in it came the former forest schools secretary, so the deputy chief Přemek Hauser got up and instead of working together they began to argue, as Skaroupka had been accused of having no right to organize the conference.”

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Being a boy Scout isn‘t about wearing uniform, it‘s a matter of attitude and behavior

František Šmajcl, ED
František Šmajcl, ED
zdroj: Post Bellum

František Šmajcl was born on October 23rd 1953 in Netolice. He was a member of a Boy Scouts Troop in České Budějovice, founded on April 8th 1968 by the Kovařík family. However, shortly after that, its leader, Zdeněk Kovařík, had to disband the eight-member troop with a tiger as its totem animal. On the last evening, he promised the troop members that he would return to the Scout Movement as soon as possible. That happened on December 2nd 1989, during the national Boy Scout gathering in the Municipal Library in Prague (Praha). But in the years prior to that, František Šmajcl had been harassed by the State Security who would eavesdrop on him and keep him under surveillance. In the 1990s, František Šmajcl had been elected into the Scout movement Wolf Cub division‘s leadership, from 1995, he was a chief for two terms and for the next two terms he was a chairman of Junák organisation. He resigned from all his posts in 2006.