Dalibor Funda

“There was the First of May scaffolding on the north side. The mayor – or the Chairman of the Local National Committee at the time – used to stand there along with all the regime officials and people who welcomed the Russians in 1968 and so on. The brass band used to be the first to come and they just played there. That was the last time that we as scouts took part in the First of May celebration. We were wearing our uniforms, and Young Border Guards were marching behind us. They were an offshoot of the ‘pioneer’ organisation. I’ll get back to that. Many children joined them because a radio brigade of the Border Guard was stationed in Planá. They lived in the castle, and so there were many officers and top brass of the Border Guard living in Planá’s residential development. There was no confrontation, in the sense of them enforcing communist policy. We simply coexisted, especially during the thaw of 1968. Some children from the Young Border Guards were pretty arrogant, though. One of them started shouting at us; I won’t name him, but others joined him: ‘Scouts are c…s!’”

“It felt like the developments were dragging on forever. So, I got some paper tubes like you use to carry drawings; they were 50, 60, or 70 centimetres long and had a lid. I wrote town names on them – Stříbro, Mariánské Lázně, Planá, and Chodová Planá, and I had a contact in each of the towns. For example, there was Tonda (Antonín) Kraus in Stříbro, and in Planá there was Mr Kalaš, the first post-1989 mayor of the town. I went to the Florenc bus station and gave the tubes to the bus driver, and my contacts would pick up the tubes with information leaflets, magazines and newspapers from the bus luggage compartment at their respective stops. Later on, we used big rolls. This is how the distribution worked back then.”

“I was reading a newspaper and eating something. As I was reading, a baton hit my paper and my shoulder. A cop and an armed railway guardsman grabbed me and took me to the station police office. They sat me down. By then, my train to Planá had left. They had me sit there for like 20 minutes. A guy came in. He brought a one-third glass of beer and some food wrapped in paper. He opened it, and it was the black head cheese. He sat opposite me, and I wanted to ask him. ‘Shut up!’ He was cutting the head cheese with a pocket knife and sipping beer. I remember it like today. I asked him: ‘How can you eat the head cheese without bread?’ He jumped out at me and started shaking me. He grabbed the knife, got on the table and cut my entire pocket with the badge off.”