Professor, Ing. Zdeněk Šandera

“Once I wanted to try if our Scout methods worked with so-called ‘guilty’ youth, which basically meant young delinquents. I invited a young man from Brno aged 14 – 15, who had committed a criminal act to one of our summer camps. I met him in court – he was ordered to come to one of our camps. He was kind of restless and a bit primitive. He had a weaker social background and an incomplete family. His mom was divorced and had lost one arm so they had a bit of a hard life. He came to our camp and got involved in our activities. He was a fun guy and he tried to everything we did. In his spare time, he would wander around the surrounding forests. The camp was in Vysoké Žibřidovice and it was shortly after the end of the war in 1947 or 1948. It was quite usual to find lots of weapons and ammunition like hand grenades, rifles and machine guns lying around in the forests. The Germans had left it there when they were retreating from the area at the end of the war. The forests around Kralický Sněžník were deep and poorly explored by then. We knew that there were explosives in the forests and we therefore forbid the boys to go there. But he wouldn’t listen to anyway us and walked in the forest all the time. One day – it was around noon – they boys started shouting ‘brother, brother, he’s coming from the forest and he’s got something in his hands’. He was carrying two hand grenades in each hand. He had found it somewhere in the forest and he laid it down next to my tent. I told him to bring it away but he wouldn’t take it in his hand anymore because the boys had told him that it was dangerous. He told me to do what I could with it. So I ordered the boys to leave the camp, asked my assistant to help me and we carried the grenades out of the camp. We put them in a place outside of the camp and had a guard patrol them from a safe distance. Then we sent one boy to the local police station in Staré Město pod Sněžníkem. In about two hours the police came and safely detonated the explosives. It was a very loud bang. After he had seen this, that boy realized what could have happened and the smile disappeared from his face.”

“Franta Bahník was the counselor in the first troop – it was the seagulls. It was a good time for me there because Franta Bahník was a very able young man, a true Scout leader. He had talent and was universally skillful. He was also good at sports and was a non-smoker. He was strict in this respect. When I was about thirteen or fourteen years old, I was trying to smoke like all the others. But Franta Bahník told us that those who wanted to be in his group would not be allowed to smoke. We were so impressed with him that we gave it up. Since then, I haven’t had a cigarette in my mouth.”

“In 1945, there was a huge boom in Scouting. Everybody wanted to do it. Because all the kids that wanted to be in some youth organizations that were nonexistent during the war now joined the Scout. In 1945, I was 22 years old and I was expected, well we were all expected to not only be Scouts but also Scout leaders. So I asked for the only Scout position in all of my life because afterwards, I have always been elected to positions. I came to brother Komárek who was a group leader and told him that I would like to become a leader. He appreciated it but told me that I had to find the boys first. So I got together a group of boys from the suburbs of Prague and from the city. We gave ourselves the number 35 and that’s how the 35th troop was created. It still exists today