"In order for us to attend other events, it was combined with a birthday party. Or maybe we reported to the national committee that we were getting married. So my sister got married about four times, I got married a few times too, a lot of our friends, like we reported the party, like there's a candle. At that candle there were banned bands playing - like at that time there was Hovězí výsek, Hally Belly, just old bands like that. I don't know if a lot of them are still playing, I stopped following it after I entered the convent in the '90s. But they were amazing events, where not only was the drinking flowing, but just the atmosphere, the fact that it was lyrics, political lyrics, it kept us in some kind of that enthusiasm of fighting against that communism. You can fight like that too."
"My dad had a heart condition after a rheumatic fever and had undergone one valve operation in 1981. And then he actually had a second one in 1989, but he didn't survive. And what Dad told us just before he died was that he wouldn't have had to have the second operation if he had had the first operation. And he said, 'Yes, they did open me up, but because I didn't want to sign a cooperation with the State Security and I refused to give a financial bribe to the professor who was going to operate on me, they just opened me up, looked at my heart and closed it again.' And he told us really, I was already that eighteen or nineteen years old."
"My father was still studying at VUML in the nineteen-sixties. And VUML was the Evening University of Marxism-Leninism. He confided to us, just before he died, in April 1989, he confided to us that he actually studied for the reason that he wanted to know the enemy that was destroying this nation. He wanted to get to know, in fact, the ideology that is gradually infesting the whole of Czechoslovakia. He passed all the exams and then had to submit his dissertation. And when he submitted it, it was only then that they, the bosses, found out that he was a Catholic, that he had written a dissertation comparing the personalities of Jesus Christ and Lenin. So for that they fired him, in fact they gave him a diploma from that study. But he was proud of it in a way, that he made it to the end. That he didn't get fired at the exams, but that he made it to that end. And because of that, he decided that he was really going to fight hard against that communism, so he wasn't afraid to make his views known and present himself publicly and in church."
Marie Konvalinková was born on November 6, 1969 in Uherské Hradiště into a Catholic family. Her father, František Konvalinka, opposed the occupation and was involved in Catholic dissent, rewriting and distributing samizdat pamphlets and adopting Catholic literature from abroad. The witness soon joined him as a teenager. Soon she became involved in political dissent as well, and found herself in the underground milieu that helped her and her sister fight communism. As a child, she experienced bullying from her teachers, who found the religious orientation of her entire family a thorn in their side. She experienced a series of police interrogations, which reinforced her beliefs. After the revolution, she was able to go to university as her studies were denied during the normalisation period. She then began to work in social work and psychotherapy.
