"The roads were paved with limestone. Limestone is of course alkaline, peat is on the other side of the spectrum, it is simply acidic. Of course, the plant and animal life has been adapted over the millennia to the acidic environment, so when the roads suddenly started leaching alkaline water into the peat bogs, it was a disaster. So when finally the pressures of the scientific community came to the point that this needed to change, they switched, and I was involved, to porphyritic, which is a rock that is not from Krkonoše, but acidic, and it did not affect the peat bogs. But in the meantime, some of the sediments were already there from earlier times. Especially the botanists at that time, of course, started to get involved in the idea that the limestone should be dredged, transported and replaced with acid rock. Of course, for the comrades it was some extra work, it was some naturalist's invention, so they were almost put in the position of traitors with exaggeration for wanting such nonsense. There was some sort of a tug-of-war about it. I wasn't directly involved in that, it was more of a conservation department thing. I was involved in the future so that only the suitable rocks would be put in and not the unsuitable ones."
"Under the communists it was the case that - frankly - our vote didn't mean much. It was simply decided in completely different positions. Of course, we did raise these objections as KRNAP, but they often fell on deaf ears because there were higher interests. The communist government was not interested in building any separators, desulphurisation plants at those power stations. What was important here was how many megawatts were produced. It was a general political trend, and our protests were there, but they were also a little bit limited, because the directors, of course, were party officials, and they were careful that the protests were not too hard, because it could damage their career, they could be dismissed and they could be replaced by someone more obedient. So yes, of course the park protested, raised objections and so on, but they had their limits, and even those limits were not respected by the party superiors because, as I said, this was all about the tons and megawatts extracted."
"I wasn't actively involved, but I did write to various national parks around the world. It's just geological material from those national parks that´s to America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, such developed countries. I was, of course, registered by the police, that is, by the State Security officers. Then when my friend emigrated, we wrote to each other, and of course we wrote openly in our letters. Even though I wrote a made-up return address, they found out very soon who was writing it. After the revolution, when I went to look at State Security materials, I found out that I had been registered. The escape of that friend, actually, was such a stroke of bad luck, because they had been keeping a file on me for some time before that. Because they couldn't distinguish and they thought that I was corresponding with the West, well, it was just a red line. They weren't able to distinguish at all because they weren't letters. I actually wrote, please send me here, I'm a geomorphologist from a national park, I'm interested in geomorphology in other national parks, can you send me some material? They were very helpful, I usually got maybe a whole stack of books, maps and so on. The State Security officers were not able to distinguish that there was no politics involved. I was simply led to believe that I was corresponding with the West, and then when I wrote these letters with this friend, they very quickly found out my non-communist thinking. So they thought that they could use me for cooperation by me writing to the West. They took it that they were my friends. The people I wrote to were not my friends. Then when they found out what my real mindset was from those letters to that friend, my bundle ended up saying, that my mindset is that I'm just useless for them, so maybe in a way it saved me from some possible offers that I wouldn't have accepted anyway, of course, but maybe it would have cost me a job, that's how I saved myself because I was useless for them."
Vlastimil Pilous was born on 20 March 1946 in Hostinné. His father was a naturalist, his mother worked as a kindergarten teacher. Vlastimil Pilous graduated from elementary school and the then secondary school, the so-called eleven-year school, in Hostinné. In 1963, he began studying at the Faculty of Science of Charles University in Prague, majoring in geography and biology. In 1968 he graduated from the university. In August of the same year, he started one-year basic military service as a graduate. During the war he also experienced the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact troops. In 1969, he started working in the Krkonoše National Park, where he worked throughout his professional life. In 1971, he received the academic degree of RNDr. He was engaged in geomorphological research and published numerous articles in professional and popular science journals. He was the editor of the professional journal „Opera Concortica“. In the Krkonoše National Park he experienced the devastation of this mountain range by immissions and unprofessional interventions, which were carried out despite the warnings of experts. After 1989, he travelled to many countries around the world, where he carried out geomorphological field surveys, which he subsequently published in the professional press. He married in 1971. His wife is also a biologist. She taught in Hostinné all her life and at the end of her professional career she was a school principal. Vlastimil Pilous and his wife have two sons. He still works in the Krkonoše National Park and considers the Krkonoše Mountains and the entire Czech massif to be a wonderful and interesting landscape. In 2022 he was awarded the „Medal of the Hradec Králové Region for successful scientific activity and work for the development of the region“.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
