Marie Dudová

“The bishop meant a lot to me, back then he was not a cardinal yet, Tomášek. I talked a lot to him because I was from his diocese too. And he had never forgotten when he came to Velehrad, so he stopped to see me. I was in the meadow with the disabled children, and he was the only executive bishop, because there were none before it started. Then there was one in Brno and so on. He always asked, he did not make an idle talk. He always hit a few sentences. I very much remember him, certainly Mr. Cardinal. And one met more personalities there. For example, Cardinal Špidlík brought a former general to Velehrad. He is already dead, in the legends of the Saint, Pedro Arrupe. He was such a character ... He shone. I was lucky to have met a lot of such people, spiritual greats.”

“And now that the twenty-first of August came, we were in the church in the evening [before], where we celebrated the 25th birthday of our chaplain. We went home, it was about ten o'clock, and in the morning, because we overslept, we couldn't hear the plane's raid. I went to work in the morning, by the tram, it did not go. Nothing anywhere. I didn't turn on the radio, so I went back home and said, 'Mom, play the radio, something's going on.' I go on foot. And it was about an hour journey to the Lesser Town, so I saw that somewhere by the Radio studio, I went from the back, there was shooting, smoke. It never occurred to me that this could happen. I ran in the back. I avoided the back of Wenceslas Square and walked along Národní třída. They played the anthem; people were crying. I thought I was from a different world. I don't even know what's going on. And I met a musician who lived in the Lesser Town, and he says, 'That's terrible, isn't it?' And I say, 'Sir, I don't know what's terrible.' There are already tanks at the National Theater.”