"Everything was voluntary there. That means... I know that we painted it, when you enter the school for mechanical engineering, basically right in that large ground floor space. It was there on the ground. It was basically organized there, drawn. Then the people who really organized something, they had their headquarters there above the stairs, like the auditorium. So basically people who really influenced something went there. For our school. Because for all the students, that's what I think it was called at the Academy of Performing Arts in... U fascistov? It was a café that was in the House of Anti-Fascist Fighters, so it was automatically nicknamed among the young people U fascistov."
"Tree of Life, that was an initiative that had nothing to do with the Forestry Commission. You just had to have some kind of cover. So basically the volunteers who started this and the first camp, or the first rescue that took place, was Čierny Balog and the narrow gauge railway. So when... There were huge fights over the fact that the forestry companies wanted to cancel the railway. So a lot of the tracks had already been torn up. But there were two people, Vlado Paško and Klára Jančurová, who were basically responsible for the fact that it was still possible... What you see now in Čierny Balog, they actually saved it. Before the foresters could basically tear it all up and destroy it. And these... You always have that there has to be someone who is dedicated and dedicated and puts that enthusiasm and energy into it. And since this has already somehow It was slowly working, so you needed some political cover for it... you needed some political cover for it at the time, so it fit under the SZM. But it couldn't fit under anything else, well."
And we started to philosophize about where Czechoslovakia was, where the border was, and where Austria was. And as we stood there, these three young fuckers, we, of course, also pointed with our hands, saying, well, this is the Morava River, so that means Austria is already beyond the river. We were there for about two minutes. And in two minutes, the border guards immediately arrived. They jumped out of the jeep they had there. One of them pulled his nose, stood there by us: 'Guys, don't even move!' The other one, who had a higher rank, took what he had on his side, a field telephone, walked up to an ordinary wooden pole, stuck himself on the pole, called out somewhere and uttered the memorable sentence: 'We've got them now!' Which of course immediately made us realize, what the hell is going to happen now? So they were chatting among themselves, they probably got some instructions. The one with the higher rank and the phone came to us and asked for our ID cards, wrote down all our details, asked where we went to school. We: Hubeného Gymnasium. Excellent. He gave us our ID cards back and said: 'Well, guys, now you turn around and get on the first bus that comes from here and go back to Bratislava.' Just like us, the ones who are stuck up, when some soldier with a gun is standing next to you, you don't put up much resistance. So we did it."
Rastislav Kocour was born on December 1, 1968 in Bratislava. His grandfather Ernest almost lost his life when a heavy metal gate fell on him during the bombing of Apolka and he suffered a serious skull injury. His wife and their eight-year-old daughter fled to Austria to join relatives before the approaching front, because there were all sorts of rumors about the Russian army. Grandfather Antonín was a Sudeten German. After World War I, he went to Prague, where he trained as a gardener. His departure from the Sudetenland was a fortunate move, otherwise he would most likely have been recruited by the Wehrmacht during World War II. Rasťo‘s family was never interested in politics. Except for his grandfather Ernest, who joined the Communist Party after the war. He left it in 1952 when he lost all his savings after the currency reform. At grammar school, Rasťo began to perceive the dark side of the regime. The group listened to underground representatives and he himself played their songs on the accordion and guitar. According to him, a significant failure was the government‘s attitude and reaction to the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. When the regime first hushed up the situation and then downplayed the consequences. He felt defenseless against the system when border guards pointed a machine gun at him during an innocent trip to Devín. In 1986, he began to become active in the conservation movement Strom života. For example, he participated in saving the narrow-gauge railway in Čierny Balog or repairing the Spiš and Ľupčany castles and the Martinské open-air museum. There he met his wife, with whom he has two sons. When he learned about the strike after the outbreak of the Velvet Revolution, he did not hesitate to get involved. He and his classmates created posters and hung them around Bratislava. In 1992, Rasťo graduated from the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and completed his military service in Břeclav. He was one of the last to complete his military service in Bohemia before the division of the republic. After completing his military service, he worked for some time as a salesman for various computer companies, and in 1998 he began to make a living as a seller of agricultural machinery, which he still does today.
