Pavel Kalus

“Military service robbed me of my illusions. I was raised at home to think that if someone earns a university degree - say, as a doctor or a lawyer - he knows his field, but he is also an educated person. That means that he attends concerts, visits the theatre. He knows how to greet people, how to behave. What to do when someone... in short, how to act. So I was raised at home and I expected this. And I was utterly shocked when I saw young doctors or medics, fresh graduates doing their military service, how badly they could behave. How shallow those people were in a certain sense. So I’m not surprised nowadays to find that a doctor reads Blesk [Lightning - the main, nationwide tabloid - trans.] - a newspaper I would expect him to never even pick up. So I lost that illusion.”

“We didn’t know what would happen. One friend brought me a boy who had been beaten up on National Avenue and was being searched for by the police. We gave him asylum for three days. Our connection with Prague was... there were no mobiles. We had a phone line, but we were worried it was bugged. So we just didn’t really know what was going on exactly, how the secret services worked, or whether we were endangering the boy. We called him The Beekeeper because he worked at a large apiary on the outskirts of Prague. I don’t even remember his name. Just ‘The Beekeeper’. I remember the atmosphere, how he told us what he had been through, and how we absorbed the tension and the fears, when things continued to go for better, if he would get permission from Prague to go back again. It was a very emotional time. I am grateful to God for it. We experienced so many things in our lives in that period, I think more than the generation before us. There were so many things going on in a relatively short period of time that our life was fulfilling.”

“I was at an age when I didn’t decide about it yet. I guess I didn’t even have much of an opinion about it. I was hurt that we lost the club room, which we had equipped ourselves. That the Pioneers took our equipment. That we weren’t allowed to meet any more. That’s what we felt about it - that it was a pity and that it was a mistake. The church environment replaced these activities for us. We did these things in the church community. We played volleyball together. We had the evening sessions. We went camping together. We even went on the work trip to Kunvald together. So it moved elsewhere.”

„There was a Russian teacher. Her name was Ms. Adámková. She studied in Moscow and met her husband there – a Czech, who also studied there, so it was a couple we kind of made fun of. They went on about the Soviet Union, Russian literature, pictures etc. They were simply a lot into it, they lived for it. I have to say that the Russian teacher helped me create a relation to Russian literature; although she taught me Russian, but within a year I was already caught. Then I got back to the elementary school and they threw out the teacher, for she didn’t agree with the entry of the Armies. First she had to peel onion at home... They brought boxes of onions from Fruta, and she simply kept peeling it at home and in the evening they took ten boxes back or how many she ought to make. They didn’t want to take her anywhere, so she worked as a train guard. So when I later went to apprentice, I took a train in Miroslav and met my first Russian teacher, who asked me: ‚How are you, Pavel?‘, I always answered something, we whispered a bit, she checked my tickets and went on. It was a kind of a memento for me: I still saw the injustice done on the lady professor. I was terribly sorry. What she taught me, she could teach many more students…“

„Daddy was a big musician. He played the organs to start with and the drums to end up. There were jolly stories in the family, how grandad was looking a big grim when the father brought a drum set home. They had to move it down the cellar not to disturb the neighbours... Once our father came back home unexpectedly, he found grandad sitting in the cellar trying various rhythms. So he understood his son eventually. The father also played a trumpet, the jazz one... Actually when he was about to graduate, his ensemble was touring France. Granny, being a strict woman, she told the father: ‚Vláďo, think about it really – I think you should graduate first. That blowing of yours, that´ll wait.‘“

„They said: ‚But what faith and the world stands on, are the good people. And for good people, there has to be good books and good education.‘ So the Dutch helped by delivering literature – professional for the priests, foreign but also we sang with the guitar and youth, so we wrote our own songbook on a typewriter and used it to sing on. They said: ‚You could really use a songbook!‘ So we agreed and – just a moment, I got it in the next room, I will bring it shortly... It is called the New song, so we sorted the songs and typewrote them down, photocopied it and they made this little songbook in Holland for us. It was smuggled back to Bohemia. Back then it was an important thing for us all; my generation grew up on the New song book...“