Martin Mejstřík

"My friend, a classmate, and I started a magazine in the third year of high school, which was actually an illegal, typewritten magazine. We had a lot of support from the teachers, who, and this was important, the support of those professors who didn't like the communists either, which I'll name the two most important ones here - Dušan Šoltys and Tonda Sedláček, who encouraged us. They nudged us from behind and advised us in various ways and so on. So we started to play theatre, we built a band and everything outside the system, outside the SSM, where it was the only official platform where you could do these things. We were doing it outside and we started to run into the school management, of course, because on the one hand we pulled down a huge support of those students who were cheering for us and participating in the events, but on the other hand we ran into the regime, of course, and even our headmaster, who was quite benevolent and nice, so of course he couldn't let this like that happen at his school."

"I definitely wondered if communism wasn't a good way to go after all, it was just that these people had messed it up. So I was like on the one hand I had that communism, on the other hand I already knew something about Christianity and I was thinking about which of the two paths was the right one. Because both of them - the religion, Christianity, and the communism, the ideology - they wanted the best for man. And that's exactly how the parson ended up, perhaps. He didn't press us, that even though I went to that Sunday school for several years, I didn't become that religious person. My mother didn't force me, we went to church with her, but there's just an important moment in every denomination, I think, when you go to Holy Communion. We didn't go there because we didn't have that faith, that conscious faith."