Josef Hladiš

“After we came to Bohosudov, there was this first roundup and all the big shots came, they were all State Security and all. And, of course, they gave us this long lecture about how there was going to be prosperity from now on, how great it was all going to be, how awesome it was all going to be. And that they're just going to make sure that there's prosperity. And that there's going to be this wonderful communist paradise. After all that propaganda, and it was literally just propaganda.. But of course, we were twenty-year-old boys at that time, we knew very well that it was just a farce, that the communists were mere invaders who took power in Czechoslovakia. All the forty people who were brought there, the young people. We were, the young people, we were separated from the older ones, and of course they wanted us to decide in the very first days whether we wanted to go into civilian life, into employment or to study, they stated that the party and the government would fix everything for us. And, of course, to their surprise, as the Communists thought it would be easy, and that they would scare us boys, me and the rest of the boys, that we would all join some of their institutions. But of our forty people, none of us applied, none of us wanted to leave the monastery to join some state enterprise or a school or an institution or an educational institution. No one applied, no one at all. They were furious that the Jesuits were controlling the youth, but it was due to the education. We had the most important thing there was, our good God and Lord and Jesus Christ and all that religious matter and of course that kept us going. And we had to endure it all."