Ing. Hubert Poul

"And then 1970 came and at that camp, when I was already a leader of a team of Wolf Cubs, they were called Hedgehogs. And I actually had ten wolf Cubs who were from Černošice, who came there from Černošice, so actually guys that I knew. Well, that was the last official camp, and by then you already knew, the normalization pressures were starting. It was already known that it would probably be the last camp. And indeed, during the holidays a letter came that the local organization was being transferred to the SSM, that was the Socialist Youth Union. Well, of course, we as 15-year-olds had a big problem with that. And so it was decided in the centre that the property that we had would be given away, that is, mainly the library, that yes, there wasn't much material, but mainly the library, so it would be given away among the older scouts, and the money that was left would be spent. And so we did a big all-centre party in September at the beginning of the year, and the remaining money was eaten through. So that was the last meeting, but what's really tied to that last meeting is that we had some desire within ourselves to continue that."

"But the interesting thing was when after those fortnight my dad and mum took us to Prague, took a taxi and we drove around the whole centre. And they showed us what had happened in Prague. Shot windows, now there were these tanks at every intersection, armed soldiers. Now they were sitting there with these machine guns, so of course it was very interesting for us as boys, but at the same time we didn't know what to think about it. So it was such a difficult time, and I guess, as far as I can remember, the biggest experience was when my mother came to work for the first time after something like fourteen days, three weeks, and she was telling us what it was like in the Czechoslovak Radio, how devastated, destroyed, shot up. They came into their office, into that newsroom, they had an archive of all the footage of all those programmes that they had filmed, prepared, it was on tape reels. The reels were all pulled out, the tapes were in a pile. She even said that there was a corner in that one room that had been burned out, so that the Soviet soldiers there acted as if they didn't know where they were. Whether they were looking for anything, you don't know, but we were struck by how the tapes were pulled out. Why were they pulling it out, because it served no purpose."

"Because I grew up alone in a Catholic environment, in a Catholic family, we went to Sunday services, so it was not like a foreign environment for me. And I spent several holidays at his parish house in Nymburk. Well, that's where I discovered the world. I was discovering the world there, because the parish house was, he lived in the former dean's house, which was a kind of a shack, I would say, it's been renovated now, a kind of a shack where the parish house used to be, and it's stuck to that town wall in Nymburk. And not only in that church of St. Giles, which even in my teenage years I perceived as something wonderful, something that just completely overwhelmed me, whenever I went in there, actually even between those walls, I felt so good there. He still had that classic parish household where he had a housekeeper, her husband looked after the garden. There was a big, huge orchard, so a big space for us. And I think he actually educated us in a great way with his kind of quietness, without saying anything. He was actually showing us how to behave. So I don't know if it was purposeful, but he continued to set such a huge example for us. He never said anything bad about the people who tormented him. Never. He forgave them. And he actually kept that forgiveness by not wanting to talk about them because he knew that if he started talking about them, he had to say something about them. So he didn't want to talk about it much either. But we felt ourselves that his nature was terribly generous in this. Without saying it. Maybe that's why he was able to be rector."