František Vejvoda

* 1933

  • “It was thirty kilometers from Paris, on the Seine river which ran for about five hundred meters there. That’s where our camp was. It was a World Scout Jamboree of all different nations – Native Americans, Scotsmen. They played their instruments. Our brass band had many concerts there because we were popular. And at the end of the Jamboree we were declared the best Scout band in the world.”

  • “We used to have our meetings in a nursery school where my mother’s cousin had been a nurse in charge, and that’s where we experienced all this. We went to pass the test of bravery to the forests. We had to mark a cross on a specific spot to prove that we were there and then return back. Then we went on walks and trips all the way to the Kunětice mountain castle. And I have one ‘beautiful’ memory from there. We were cooking soup in this hollow and suddenly some young boys appeared above the hollow, a little older than us. They were from the Hitler Youth and they were approaching us slowly. Suddenly their commander appeared, shouted at them and we were free. So that’s a memory from our childhood.”

  • “My father got the worst of it because he got sick and died shortly afterwards. He couldn’t stand to watch it because they had taken it away from him twice – during the occupation when they had stored aircraft engines here – and then the comrades took it away from us. And from the playground that we had had, they made a school canteen instead. They fenced us in, we couldn’t even go there. So, the size of our property diminished. Today we only have the main building and a little courtyard where I have one garden bed and that’s it. Everything else now belongs to the school. When we asked for it they told us we weren’t entitled to it because it had been seized back in those times. It had been nationalized and expropriated. And the school built their canteen on an expropriated land.”

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    Hradec Králové, 10.03.2020

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I’ve been a Scout and a musician my whole life

František Vejvoda in a Scout uniform
František Vejvoda in a Scout uniform
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

František Vejvoda was born March 29, 1933 in Hradec Králové. His father Vojtěch and his wife Marie ran a restaurant in their house called ‘U Vejvodů’, later renamed to ‘U čeného orla’. Their restaurant had been a center of the city’s cultural life until the World War II. František had three siblings. He met with his friends in a group called the Vultures, drawing on the example of Rychlé šípy (Rapid Arrows). The Nazis seized the restaurant hall of the Vejvoda family in 1944 and established an aircraft engine warehouse there. Right after the war František Vejvoda joined a Scout troop and became a trumpeter in a Scout band. In 1947 he attended a Scout Jamboree in France. The family lost their business after the Czech coup in 1948 and the Scout movement ceased its activity as well. František trained to be a cook, then completed a hotel school and started gaining experience in the restaurant business. He taught technical classes at a hotel school in Teplice nad Metují for twenty years. He married Jiřina, née Štěpánová, and together they had two sons and settled in Hronov. František liked teaching, doing sports and has played the trumpet his entire life in a band that was transferred back under the Scout organization after 1989. In the 1990s he took over the formerly nationalized family property and has ran a grocery store. In 2019 he received a commemorative medal from the cities Hradec Králové and Hronov.