Michal Holeček

"I knew I was doing a legal thing, but bolsheviks saw it as illegal. We disagreed on that. That's why I tried to conspire, but I knew that the cage would close and there would be a penalty for it. The cases that were dealt with by the Charter or the Committee for the Protection of the Unjustly Prosecuted (VONS) were one hundred percent related to people doing things that they had a right to do. But the state power forbade them to do so by some lower legal standards. If a priest celebrated mass elsewhere than in his church, he was obstructing the state's supervision of the churches. If he taught religion in homes, the same section 178. So the discrepancy between injustice and a formally correct law was so great that I knew the cage would close. Some chatter somewhere in clubs or at home about bolsheviks being assholes, you got away with it quite routinely. But printed materials? The Bolshevik was really allergic to those. Whether it was home-made samizdat or smuggled exile literature."

"I knew the cage would close. My wife knew it too, and I must confirm that she showed extraordinary courage. A mother of children is more afraid and different than a father who is nursing his free-spirited ego - to put it badly. I tried to make a kind of resistance, but my wife took it up with me and was worried about our children. Not so much for me. I knew what I was doing. She was worried about me. She showed extraordinary bravery all those years, all those ten years. I was aware of that then and later... Women in the church, women in dissent, that's a chapter in itself..."