We would bring grandpa food secretly

As a granddaughter of Adolf Novotný, an Evangelical priest and the founder of J. A. Comenius Camp, Marta Kellerová would stay at Běleč since early childhood. Her family built a log cabin in the middle of the camp early on and spent time there, surrounded by the activities of young Christians. As the state’s pursuit of reducing the influence of churches on young people escalated, the conditions for the operation of the camp started to change during the 1950s. “Grandpa was banned from the camp,” the witness recalls. “The church shrank under the authorities’ pressure, agreed that grandpa was a bad influence on the youths and the headquarters just wrote him off. I cannot understand to this day how grandma and grandpa could bear it.” Since camp could not operate without the grandma, Marta Novotná, she continued and grandpa Novotný lived in a dry house by the forester’s lodge near the camp. “We the kids would bring grandpa lunches. That’s how it went for a year or two. It must have been incredibly humiliating for my grandma.” Later on the camp was to be incorporated in the Pioneers’ Organisation of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth. The former campers, who were also active as part of the Pioneer, undertook the task. They asked the church for a long-term lease of the premises, in effect saving the camp from expropriation. However, that was the end of an important era in Adolf Novotný’s family. The camp was returned to the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren after the Velvet Revolution and Adolf Novotný’s ideas live on in it – and today, this is primarily thanks to his granddaughter Marta Kellerová who is involved in the camp’s operation and development.