"We were reading poems aimed against the state. I still don't know whether the communists, the StB Secret Police, knew about it or not, because among us there were guys who worked as wardens in the Minkovice prison, too; at least I knew about one. Reading these poems would have been sufficient grounds for putting us behind the bars. There were forty or fifty people gathering there and sometimes we didn't even know everybody. We would come on Saturday evenings and on Sunday mornings, Slavoj would stand up on the billiards table and read out the poems to Franta. Most of them would win the 'Behind the Golden Bars' Contest (a term used jokingly for humour aimed against the state – transl.'s note).".
"They stayed in touch through letter-writing. I believe that Franta Bartoš lived in Vienna, and one day they managed to travel there with a Čedok tour and they met in Vienna. The StB knew about their correspondence, naturally. This is proven by the fact that in the 1980s (probably in 1986) the Secret Police arrived to see my father, and among other things, they were asking him about the National Socialist Party in the exile. My father didn't even know that this party existed in the exile. But Antonín Bartoš was its member. (...)"
"When father suspected that he might be arrested, he buried the gun which he still had from the times of his deployment, under the raspberry bushes in our garden. He wrapped the gun in an oily rag, placed in it a can and buried it in the ground. He was searching for it after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, using an army metal detector. When they found the gun, it was already damaged because of the clay soil. The can had not been buried deep enough, and water had leaked into it. The can was damaged by corrosion and the oiled cloth could not protect the gun anymore. (…) Had I known about it, I would have unearthed it earlier."
"My life motto? I discovered how strongly attached to Malá Skála I was. When I was around twenty and I was contemplating emigration, the idea that I would not be able to come back here again was so intense that I decided to have my family here. It was obvious that I would not be able to make any career here. I concentrated on work and I didn’t mind manual work, either."
"The Germans proceeded with increasing brutality. Nobody had anticipated that the terror launched by the Germans would reach this scale. From an international point of view, the assassination has certainly helped. It helped the Czechoslovak Republic and it supported the resistance in other countries. I believe that if the paratroopers had known what happen, they would have done it again. The later belittlement of our resistance was quite made up. The importance of the western resistance movement was being diminished and only the eastern resistance was being discussed. If we compare the two, there were actually not that many resistance groups from the east, and those which operated here were being deployed right in front of the advancing Red Army and were assigned to take over power and organize the National Committees. They were not engaged in intelligence activity."
Čestmír Šikola is the son of the paratrooper, Čestmír Šikola, who was a radio operator in the group “Clay”. He was born in Malá Skála several weeks after his father’s arrest in May 1949. He studied grammar school in Rokycany and Turnov. During the Prague Spring of 1968 he began studying at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He lived and worked in the regions of Jablonec and Trutnov. In 1967, together with his friends of the same age, he founded a local comedy club called “Freemen’s Club of Malá Skála”. He still lives there and he is a great supporter of his homeplace.
