“We woke up at four in the morning as aunt, who lived upstairs of us, turned on her radio. When the radio said there was an invasion, she came down to tell us. She was crying. She had witnessed both the first and second World Wars, and was afraid of the third. She was so emotional we didn’t know what to do. We listened to the radio from then on. We had a boy scout meeting in the afternoon. The younger members told us to be careful and go home, and the older ones set about making posters and bending signposts to make the invaders lose their way should they head for Letohrad.”
“My father and I even visited the Dean before he made the final decision on my last resort appeal. I witnessed a rather intense situation. Looking out the window at the Sinkule Dormitory, my father was telling Dean Sedláček about how universities had been shut down in 1939 and he miraculously escaped total deployment. He was trying to explain to the Dean that, hopefully, in the 1970s the times were different from the Hitler era. That was a profound experience for me. The Dean kept a poker face, and then both me and my brother Petr Kalivoda were expelled from studies at the Czech Technical University in Prague with finality on 23 January 1976.”
“One thing the hiking team did was take a trip to the Picture Gallery in Dresden. That was the nearest major picture gallery accessible in a country we were allowed to go to. We went to Dresden officially, as a group of hiking team members. On our way back via Bautzen, we stopped by a church that was closed. Someone had the idea of knocking on the parsonage door. They answered the door and allowed us to walk through the church. As a way of saying thank you, one of us played a song on the guitar and we sang along. By the way, that church is unique in that its single nave is shared by both Roman Catholic and Evangelical communities. The bus driver assessed this [singing in the church] as a politically dangerous matter, reported it to the State Security, and they rated it as us organising church services abroad. When they were expelling me from school later on, this was one of their pretexts – me organising services not only in Czechoslovakia but abroad as well.”
Pavel Kalivoda was born on 25 July 1955 and spent his childhood with brothers Karel and Petr in Letohrad-Kunčice. Their father JUDr. Karel Kalivoda (1916–2008) was a lawyer and mother Růžena (1916–1981) was a housewife. Pavel loved nature and books, and built aircraft models. He joined the renewed Junák (boy scout) organisation at age 13 in 1968. In the same year, parson František Karel of the church in Letohrad-Orlice introduced guitar masses that included singing rhythmical songs. That drew the attention of many believers far and near including Pavel. Young people who attended the guitar masses also met as boy/girl scouts. The relaxed atmosphere of the era ended in a shock when the Warsaw Pact armies invaded Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968. The boy scout organisation was officially abolished in 1970. Some members joined the newly formed TJ Spartak Letohrad hiking team, so that they could keep on meeting, going for trips, going to church, and playing guitars and singing. The StB started monitoring the hiking team soon and some members were interrogated. Having graduated from the Railway Technical High School in Letohrad, Pavel Kalivoda took up studes at the CTU in Prague in 1974. Five members of the hiking team were expelled from universities due to their membership. Pavel Kalivoda was expelled by the CTU disciplinary panel with finality on 23 January 1976. He immediately got a job as a designer at Armabeton Praha and served in the military as a land surveyor in Plzeň from 1976 to 1978. He married wife Dagmar in 1980 and the couple raised two children. He eventually completed his university studies on a part-time basis in 1978–1983. Asked what he considered important in life, the witness mentioned making good use of time and one’s abilities, and placed emphasis on respect for one’s parents and faith in God. The witness lived in Staré Hradiště near Pardubice in 2021.
