Evald Rucký

"I didn't really know how to deal with it, but eventually we found shelter with my mother in Pardubice, who in the meantime had moved with her husband - he was the third man in her life, two of them died tragically - from the housing estate to the Nemošice waterworks. And in that waterworks by the Chrudimka River, there grew up these cones that covered the wells that supplied part of Pardubice, Pardubice, the Pardubice hospital, etc. from the Medlešický mound where the waterworks was built. And my mother's husband checked the quality of the water and was in charge of nine cones where you could hide the bibles, dictionaries or songbooks. I was afraid of what my mother would say about this, but my mother, as I have already described, was strongly anti-communist, so although she disagreed with my beliefs, we had very difficult conflicts, but she was immediately willing to help me in this. So we used to stuff the Bibles into the well, and there they could be well hidden in such special hiding places. Holek's was one channel, but then I found my own channels."

"And then we took the bus to Opatovice to my mother's mother's house and we went over Kunětická hora. There's a forest between Pardubice and Hradec Králové and there was a clearing that had been cleared for the most part and there were these military tanks there. And I saw it as a child, and it caused me a terrible terror, because they were mainly aimed at Pardubice and some of them were aimed at the road. And there was the smell of diesel everywhere, or whatever it was. It has a different smell today than it did then. But it smelled awful and it smelled all over the forest. And it got into our bus, and when we went back, it smelled again. So they really made a campground, a fireplace, and they lived there like they were somewhere in Siberia. Terrible. I remember that and I really didn't have a good experience. That was my year '68."