RNDr. František Pelc

"The original root cause, to say the least, was the fact that we were in the black triangle - East Germany, Poland and North Bohemia, which was destroying the surrounding mountains with its smokestack industries, whether the Krušné hory, Krkonoše, Jizerské hory or to a lesser extent other mountain ranges. In the 1980s, technologies began to be devised to deal with this, which were not successful. One of the solutions from the 1970s and 1980s, for example, was to build higher chimneys to spread the pollutants over a wider area, which undoubtedly had some significance, for example, for the agglomeration but not for the total volume of exhalations. It was particularly tragic when the fallout paths of local loads met, and they seemed to meet, especially over the mountains where they stopped. Hence the enormous damage to forests and the land, staying in our region on an infinitely large scale. It was so, I would say, already on the verge of an ecological catastrophe."

"We have, in fact, made a variation that did not exist. As students, we found stamps somewhere and made them out of a potato. With that, we took the train across what was then Ukraine. Then we flew to Mineralnye Vody and went to the Caucasus from there. The nature there was breathtaking at that time, we saw vultures and huge mountains, we were thrilled. But then we did a stupid thing - we walked down from those mountains somewhere on the other side of Georgia to bathe in the sea just outside Sukhumi, which is now, unfortunately, a territory occupied by Russia. There were about eight of us students, and we were stopped by a militiaman who was studying our documents and suspected that they were not quite right. But he didn't want to shoot students from a friendly country right away, so he put us in a pioneer camp and told us that he had to check everything, so we spent about three days there. Then we managed to explain it somehow, so they let us go again. But we only swam in the sea once, and then we had to leave."