"I sympathized with him, I did not have the opportunity, except for the proposal to emigrate, to help him in any way. I remember it was a terrible moment. My husband's mother was at our place at that time and she didn't know much about what we were going through, we didn't burden her in any way. My husband was responsible for the heating in Batelov at the time, in a boiler room in a large factory, I don't know her name. His job was to bring coal from a pile, which was frozen at minus twenty degrees, to the boiler with a mechanical shovel. For one thing, it was probably a lot of hard work, he didn't complain about it, but they probably mocked him there and I don't know if they said anything else to him there. That was the time when he came home from that job, he hit rock bottom mentally, crying. He sat down at the table, I made him some hot soup, and he sat down in front of it and cried that they were humiliating him. And the tears and the snot was dripping, it all dripped into the soup. That was when I wanted us to emigrate. It bothered me and worried me that this was destroying my husband.”
"No names, no book lists, no addresses, no phone numbers, nothing was allowed. We avoided it, but some other colleagues who accepted books or did something else had their house searches. Sometimes someone betrayed themselves and the car with those books was stopped at the border, I don't know if it was confiscated or sent back. I know that some of the arrivals were then banned from coming to the Czechoslovak Republic. We were careful not to hurt anyone."
"I found my first job as a warehouse worker in a locksmith shop in Rantířov near Jihlava. There, the manager later told me that he was in charge of me, that he should have monitored and controlled me and that he should have prevented me from being in contact with people, which was funny because the warehouseman is in contact with everyone in the company. I had such a working class there, everyone knew I was a pastor, everyone went to the warehouse and we discussed everything we could. I remember once sitting there, having a newspaper, and there was an article about Havel 'The traitor and another ugly word. There were a few people there, so we read and talked about it - and I said just for fun that I could easily imagine that this person would be our president. It was just a joke."
"We came into conflict for the first time with the state administration, church secretaries and the State Security in Libštát. Once our colleagues visited us, about fifteen or twenty of them came to our rectory. We were happy together, we talked about how we live, how we work in the church, and the regional church secretary from Hradec Králové, Jonáš, and his district colleague got involved. They had members of the SNB (National Security Corps) with them. They called us down to the parish office, the apartment was on the first floor. There they told us that we were an unauthorized New Orientation assembly. This was such a field of study in the study of theology that colleagues tried to talk in a civil way about the gospel, about faith. The regime was already terrified of what he seemed to understand. Then they accused us of being subversive members of the New Orientation and they told us to break up.”
Daniela Brodská, née Horáková, was born on August 29, 1944 in Růžďka near Vsetín into the family of an evangelical pastor and a teacher. She graduated from the Mechanical Engineering School in Břeclav and joined Jihokovo in Hustopeče as a constructor. A year later, she joined Comenius’ Evangelical Theological Faculty in Prague. In 1967 she married Petr Brodský and the following year she successfully graduated as a pastor. In 1971 and 1973, her daughter and son were born. During her pregnancy, the state authorities banned her from performing clerical service. In the second half of the 1970s, she and her husband began distributing smuggled religious books from abroad. In 1977, they signed Charter 77 with the Germans. Since their studies, they were in contact with dissidents and people from the underground. She followed her husband at the parishes in Hrubá Vrbka and Horní Dubenky, after her husband lost his state approval too, the family moved to Jihlava. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, she became involved in the activities of the Civic Forum in Jihlava. At the beginning of 1990, she became the chairwoman of the Municipal National Committee in Jihlava. After the municipal elections in November 1990, she became the mayor of Jihlava. She did not join any of the political parties and resigned in 1991. She returned to the clergy service and since 1992 she worked as a pastor in Kostelec nad Labem, Kladno, Vrchlabí and Dvůr Králové nad Labem. In 2021 she lived with her daughter and grandchildren in Dvůr Králové nad Labem.
