Jaromír Holas

* 1952

Skauti, Svědci lokálních událostí z éry komunismu
Pražské jaro, Invaze vojsk Varšavské smlouvy, Druhá obnova Junáka, Třetí obnova Junáka
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    How he didn’t become a Pioneer

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    “What affected me the most when I was a child, was that I was a Spark, which was the first level before joining the Pioneers. One of our required reading books was Timur and His Squad [a novel about a group of village kids by Arkady Gaidar, famous throughout the Soviet bloc - trans.], I went to see the film as well, several times, and Timur was my first hero. When I fulfilled all the requirements, I was to be ‘scarfed’ in the Lenin Museum, and when I told my father, he broke into a rage and roared that he wouldn’t have any Bolshevik in his house and that I wasn’t going to any scarfing. I got into trouble because of it. They asked me why I hadn’t come, why I had sabotaged the event. I replied that I didn’t want to be a Bolshevik. They gaped at me and then called my father to the school. My father explained it to them, and I didn’t become a Pioneer. The whole class had scarves except three Romani boys, which they weren’t interested in, and I became the outcast of the class.”

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    How he became a Scout

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    “Then we moved to a new residential block up in Žižkov, where I attended a different school, so I got rid of that class and joined a new class instead. That was 1964, and the regime was softening up a bit. The Pioneer organisation wasn’t so important any more. Red scarves were mandatory at the new school, and everyone had to wear them to school, except I didn’t because I wasn’t a Pioneer. Then I met one boy who was a member of the camping group called Dogheads. So I joined the camping group in 1965, and I saw that they were Scouts. It was a camping union under the Czechoslovak Union of Physical Education, and they were allowed to wear brown scarves and uniform shirts. I happily swapped the red scarf, which I’d never had any way, for the brown one, and I was really happy to find support from this other side.”

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    The difference between the Pioneers and the Scouts

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    “Pioneers organised camps that we called fattening farms. They arrived at a place, where they cooks cooking for them, their tents, huts were built, they had suitcases with them, they entered the camp and were immediately given food... Whereas we came to an empty meadow, we had to go into the wood, fell a few snags, make stakes, set up a tent, board it all around, build beds - that took us all about two days. When it was done, the troops were given duties, and the boys cooked for themselves. Every troop cooked for the whole camp in turn, so we built a camp stove, we had to furnish the kitchenette, the troop had to buy the food, cook it, clean up. It was an enormous difference. We were proud of it. The Pioneers were in a fattening farm, they hardly had to do anything at all - as far as work is concerned. Though they had sporting activities there as well. But we had to work for everything ourselves.”

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    Praha, 22.08.2017

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You raised those bastards well, the stetsecs cursed at us at the illegal Scout camp

J. Holas
J. Holas
zdroj: archiv pamětníka
zdroj: archiv pamětníka
Stáhnout obrázek

Jaromír Holas was born on 11 November 1952 in Prague, into the family of an electrician. His father had grown up in a children‘s home managed by nuns, where he was imbued with a love for the Catholic faith and a strong anti-Bolshevik stance, in which he was raised. The witness was the only child in his class not to join the Pioneers, which made him an outside. In 1965 he joined the tourist group Psohlavi (Dogheads, named after a famous book by Alois Jirásek - trans.), which secretly functioned according to the tenets of pre-war Scouting. In 1968, when the Czech Scouting Movement was renewed, Jaromír Holas took his Scout vow and began working as a Scout adviser and then leader. During the normalisation, when Scouting was banned again, the Dogheads were pushed to join the Pioneers, which they refused. They hid under the auspices of Svazarm (an association of technical enthusiasts - trans.), later under SC Slavia Žižkov, where they survived in illegality until the revolution in 1989. The Dogheads had to endure ideological inspections, which they avoided by organising camps in Eastern Slovakia, near the Polish borders where no one checked on them. After the Velvet Revolution in November 1989, the witness established a new Scout troop, Triquetrum, and succeeded in grooming a successor. Jaromír Holas worked as an air conditioning assembler at Stavoservis. He had graduated from evening grammar school and wanted to continue his studies at the Faculty of Arts, but the only subject the regime would allow him to study was industrial economics. In 1979 he started a family and paused his Scouting activities for ten years. He worked as an economist at Stavoservis, at the Administration of State Material Reserves, and in insurance. His great hobbies are sports and bicycle touring, which he enjoys with his wife. The couple have cycled all over Europe and have won dozens of medals in various races. He is active in the University of the Third Age, where he studies European religious history. His life motto is: A true man is ever a pupil.

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