Mgr. Jan Wirth

"On Saturdays are raids, sanitation day, before it starts, the senior soldiers go and open all the taps, clog the sinks, until [water] comes out on the faggots from the ground floor, they don't clean up. You don't clean up until the avalanche starts to come out, then you take a rake and you throw the water out. I've experienced that, I'm not saying every Saturday, but there were times when they were so mad they said they were going to have a proper rainy day! Or a toothbrush to clean the toilet bowl, there's no other way to do it, a toothbrush. Or I've seen them make a swimming pool in the washroom, it was upstairs, the ceiling was in danger of caving in, there was at least thirty centimetres and the ceiling started to sag downstairs. When I see the black barons, I think to myself, I've had better scenes."

"We also bred horses for foals, we had them registered in the land book, like when you have a branded car today. He [grandfather] built new buildings, he just left the old barn, otherwise he built a new barn and two buildings. So those comrades who were sitting in the pub and got intoxicated by the idea of joint farming liked it and they came to him and said, 'Jakub, we'll do it in your house, you'll be the chairman,' and he said, 'No, if you want to do it, do it, but without me.' These were the people that Grandpa pulled out of trouble during the war, they were lazy and lazy that they couldn't pay the Germans for war supplies. And then they set on him when he refused. He got a number of fines, and there was a kind of punishment for some undelivered supplies - and Dad cried that when he told the story, because he said they were brood mares and they had foals in them. The punishment was that the horses had to be shot at the gate in the morning, the comrades worked them in their foundation team, then they brought them home hungry and smothered, Dad and Granddad gave them food and they rode all night on ours, without stopping until they fell. That was the final phase before they locked Grandpa up, such drastic stuff. Then when they locked Grandpa up, they cut the horses' heads off and that was it - just because a horse is not a modern machine..."

"We had agreed to meet in Rome in a week's time in the square by the obelisk, we had agreed to meet at a certain time, we had agreed, and then we would never see each other again, we had counted on it. So we met there, we said goodbye, that we would never see each other again, that he would fly to the other side of the world and I would go to the cage. We went to the Czech Republic. We arrived on Wednesday, and on Friday, November 17, the rector Cikrle, who is now the bishop in Brno, said to me: 'Some uncle of yours,' or how he introduced himself, 'is calling from Kladno to come and see him.' So I borrowed a car from him, I was going to Kladno. There was a hotel there where people who had no right to enter Czech territory could be, like when a plane crashed, so they were sealed in and guarded by policemen or SS men and they couldn't actually go out, but they could go in, I guess, or it's strange that they let me in. Now I ran in there, now I found out it was Jarda, I didn't know where I was going at all. I didn't believe that Jarda, what would he be doing here or anything... And he said, 'Look, it was such a strong experience for me after all my life in exile that I bought the ticket myself, at least for a couple of hours.' He said, 'I've got it for about five hours and then I'm going back because they're not going to let me go anyway. I'm looking from Kladno and I'm crying here in the direction of Prague.' And he says: 'Some people here keep saying that Prague's Wenceslas Square is a terrible place.' And he says: 'Is that normal here? They're always talking about it here, that they're beating up some students..."

"When we were making the revolution, we were able to personally invite the whole of Litoměřice to a demonstration. Everybody got a letter in the mailbox, because there were three hundred of us in the building, so we managed the town just fine. We even had delegates at other schools, like the pedagogical school in Ústí, and everywhere there was a school, we had permanent delegates who led the revolution there, because we had the time and the ability. They, poor things, they were the descendants of those communists, and they didn't know what to do at all, and we knew how to do it, or we thought we did, or we wanted to. So we enjoyed that. I hardly went to school when I was in the fifth grade, we were always scaring the revolution. That was nice too, there you were walking around in Prague, you saw a taxi driver, you just raised your hand and he would take you anywhere for free if he saw you were a student carrying a packet of papers."

"It definitely wasn’t a difficult course of study, unlike what it is now, and that was because we were only allowed to be taught by professors who were approved by the Communists — and those were second- or third-tier educators. Four of them we actually kicked out ourselves during the Velvet Revolution. We, the students, decided we wouldn’t attend their lectures anymore. They were priests, but simply the ones the regime allowed to teach. And by doing that, we wanted to say: ‘We want the better ones, the ones who weren’t allowed to teach — those are the ones we need to listen to now.’"