František Urban

"In 1960, the Ministry of Agriculture, the minister at the time was Štrougal, held a large exhibition at Hybernů called 'Forests Must Live'. Minister Štrougal was at the opening. We, as fifth-year students, were obliged to work there for a week or 14 days as guides. And of course the best students went to the first batch. So I got into that first batch with six other students who accompanied Strougal and people like that and those official guests. Some of those official guests were very critical of where our forestry was going and what was being done. We, of course, took part in that as students, gaining our own knowledge. I remember one regional director who was grossly dissatisfied with a chainsaw that had been developed here somewhere in Vodňany. And I said to him, 'Well, refuse it, Mr. Director, refuse to take it,' and he said, 'I have to, I have to take it, it's an order!' And so on..."

"I have always felt sorry for the deserted landscape after the Germans left. You know, it was horrible, those barracks. I worked as a tax collector in Šumava when I was in the Institute for Forest Management, I worked in the Boubín area, and there those half-ruined villages, the villages that were plundered, the remnants of the German population, in the isolated areas, some of them were very solid, very decent people, with whom one could talk very well, often much better than with some of the settlers, who were of a very different kind. I'm not saying all of them, some were decent, very decent. I didn't distinguish between Germans and Czechs. I even had a hard time speaking Czech with some of them. I had to dust off my poor knowledge of German to get along with a former gamekeeper, for example. It was excellent, we understood each other very well, it was good. Mostly everybody left anyway in 1964 and 1965 when they could move out. Almost all of them went to Germany. This particular gamekeeper said to me: 'I have to, my girls want to go to Munich'."