Dr. Jan Štursa

"I had arranged with him [Professor Jeník], who was working at the time in Ghana, West Africa, at the University of Accra, where he was lecturing on ecology and tropical forests, that I would send him the manuscript and he would write me some comments and I would edit it according to them. I took a large envelope, sealed the thick manuscript, and to get a reply, I wrote the sender's return address on the back. Only, I don't know what came over me, I also wrote the number of the military unit of the tank battalion in Louny. I got a reply about a month later from Africa. And in the morning, we had to report. Suddenly there was a bustle and somebody came running out. It was a scribe and he tells the chief that I should go up to the battalion commander. And on the stairs he says to me, 'Man, there's some trouble, there's officers upstairs. What have you done?' I get there and I see three comrades, looking down on me. And it started. The letter came back and it was clear that in their eyes I had committed almost treason. I gave out the number of my military unit in the 1960s. And you know what saved me? The letter came in a big envelope that had two beautiful purple stamps on it that said In Memory John Fitzgerald Kennedy. It was a year after the assassination, and what saved me from prison was that one of the officers was a philatelist. He took me aside and said he'd be interested in a stamp and if I gave it to him we'd flush it under the rug."

"In 1968 the first Czechoslovak intercamp was organized here in the Krkonoše Mountains, in Rýchory. It was a strange company, because at that time there were both Eastern and Western countries, in the form of young people, variously influenced by the politics of their country. We had a wonderful program and on the night of the twenty-first of August we had a beautiful bonfire on the top of Rýchory near the Sokolka hut. Jirka Sehnal, then editor of the Krkonoše magazine, said: 'What is going on, what are those planes doing? It´s some kind of a training.' In the morning we woke up and everything was clear, because the director Klapka came up and said: 'Everything is bad, we are occupied. There are Poles down in Maršov and a Russian unit is going east here.' So I was not lazy, I rushed down to Maršov to somehow get to Vrchlabí, where I had family. I heard some heavy vehicles coming from below, so I got stuck in the woods by the trees. And indeed a unit of Russian spies arrived at Rýchory. They camped near the Dvorsky Forest Reserve, which is a memorable place that photographers especially like for its forest-like atmosphere. And they began to plunder, they dug up earthworks in a nearby meadow and began to plunder the Dvorsky Forest by pulling all the lying wood and burning it."

"My father was a very enthusiastic member of the Communist Party. Of course, I still knew nothing about social life, what it meant to be a party member or not to be a party member, to be a kulak, a bourgeois element. But I received all this vicariously and made my own judgement about it. But thanks to the fact that I was surrounded by beautiful landscapes, nature, my experience of the social reality of the time, the political reality, was adequate. It was not painful."