"So I was there, with Bishop Liška concelebrating with me on one side and Václav Malý concelebrating with me on the other side, but at that time without consent, heavily persecuted. Everything was quiet, it was very nice, I gave the blessing of the new priest, everything as it should be, and then we all moved to our garden. And now, downstairs, outside in the garden, there were people, from Dana Nemcova to Palouš, everyone, especially from the dissident plane. Upstairs in the house, there was a sitting area, today we would say VIP. There were parents sitting there, some of the closest people, of course Václav Malej, and then Bishop Liška arrived. We ushered him in, everybody stood up like that and now he said hello to everybody and went to sit down, Mr. Bishop. And now he's looking at this Václav like this and he says, 'Are you the Václav Malý who sometimes speaks from that Free Europe?' - 'Yes, yes, Father Bishop, that's me.' - 'Well, come and sit down here, so it doesn't look like I'm afraid of you.' And with that, the tension that was there dissipated. What was talked about back then, I don’t know, and probably none of us knows anymore, but it was actually a very pleasant meeting."
"Then when the Charter came, [my mother] remembered that about six months before that Jan Vladislav said: 'Milena, we are planning something against the Communists, I won't tell you yet, but it will be in January, it will be in January!' My mother, for example, never signed the Charter because Vladislav basically told her that it was very important that there were still people here who would not be famous. So I don't know, Václav Malý used to keep all the things in my grandmother's linen closet that he didn't want the SS to take away from him when they came to search him. Ivan Havel did the same, there were some things in our house. Some time ago, finally, well, it was after Jan Vladislav's death, his so-called Open Diary came out. It was all hidden in our closet, so they wouldn't take it away. Because our family was not in that exposed place, but it was a background for many people."
"And in 1948, the day before Christmas Eve, the Aesthetists came, arrested him, and he returned exactly eight years later. He went through the Jáchymov region, he was in the Příbram region, and on Christmas Eve, eight years later, they let him go. Two years before that, at his mother's humble request to the president... he was granted a pardon, but he refused it. And he said that... Well, I'll quote my mother's account in her book of memories of Radim, one of his fellow students caught him in the camp square, all brown. He never spoke bad language, never got angry. "Radim, what's wrong?" - "Oh, those communist whores want to pardon me! So for two more years, and then nobody asked him. He was taken to Prague and released from Pankrác on Christmas morning. And on St. Stephen's Day of the same year they arrested his father."
Petr M. Bubeníček was born on 12 April 1961 as the second son of Karel and Ludmila Bubeníček. His mother’s brother was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for treason and espionage in 1949, after a monster trial with the so-called illegal group Šeřík. After five years of imprisonment, he refused a pardon from the President of the Republic. His father was an architect, a co-founder of Czech Brutalism, and his mother a prominent speech therapist. During the period of normalisation, the family provided a safe haven for many friends from dissident circles. After graduating from high school, the witness began his studies at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, but after a personal conversion and an experience in the Christian community in Taizé, he decided to stop his studies and entered the seminary in Litoměřice. In 1986 he was secretly admitted to the Order of the Barefoot Carmelites in Poland. After his ordination, which he received from Cardinal Tomášek in 1988, he worked in the spiritual administration of Catholic parishes. In 2000 he was appointed parish priest in Roztoky near Prague.
