Ivana Tarantová

“You asked me whether I had ever led a troop or patrol. I have, actually. During grammar school, because I wanted to continue studying. As a little girl, I had set my mind on becoming a children’s nurse or teacher. Only many years later I realized that it was a great nonsense in my case. But I didn’t feel like joining the Socialist Youth Union in order to be allowed to study further. I simply thought it wouldn’t be fair, and so I didn’t join the Union when I was in my first year of grammar school. But later we were told that if we wanted to get admitted to the Pedagogical Faculty, we had to be members of the Socialist Youth Union, and we needed to do some internship. We thus agreed with other girls from my class that we would become leaders of a Pioneer troop. It was horrible.”

“We went to the toilet and we noticed that the leaders were sitting in the middle of the camp, holding a radio, and crying. We went to ask them what happened and they said: ´Listen to this,´ and we heard the announcement that we had been attacked by the Soviet army. We didn’t know what to do. The camp leader tried to make a phone call, but he wasn’t able to. He only managed to make a call later, from some police station. The phone lines had been probably interrupted as well. We didn’t know what was going on. When he returned, he told us that everything was occupied. There were military vehicles along the roads, with the Soviets aiming their guns at everybody. On top of that, the boys were out of the camp at that time, and my brother and cousin happened to be among them, so I was getting hysterical. For two days we waited for the bus. Then they arrived around noon or in the afternoon, and said: ´Girls, pack all your stuff, just pack your things and leave everything else here, we’re going home.´ We thus lost one week of the camp. The trip back was scary, because if you see them pointing at you with a gun or a sub-machine-gun, it’s no fun at all.”

“The movement was revived again, and it lasted for three years and then it was interrupted for another time. But this time it was much worse, because many of these people ended up in communist prisons. Those who had experienced the 1950s were afraid. Therefore I know that many of my girlfriends´parents simply didn’t allow the girls to attend Scout meetings any longer, because they feared for them. They wanted their daughters to be able to study at universities.”

“We had this great opportunity in 1970. A wonderful event was held in June of that year in Roztoky, near Prague – a gathering of all Girl Scouts from the entire country. At that time the chateau in Roztoky looked great after it had undergone a reconstruction. During the festive opening, they even had Vlasta Koseová and Rudolf Plajner join us. We could thus see the top personages there. And we also met brother Sum, the man who had been a personal secretary to Jan Masaryk.”