PhDr. Marie Rút Křížková

“But he (Otta Ornest – ed.’s note) visited me immediately before and he told me that he needed to hide those things. We thus hid them under the bathtub. Then they arrested him and right in the morning I knew that he had been arrested. Now I was worried about what to do with those things hidden under the bathtub, because he knew about them. At night at four o’clock I thus managed to… I knew one family from the church, and at four o’clock in the morning I rang their door bell and I hid the things in their home. They were the Černý family, she was a doctor and her husband was an engineer and I hid the things in their home. It was even more complicated, because that very evening, Salesian Josef Šplíchal visited us as well and he served the Holy Mass in our flat. When they later rang at our door and they brought me a letter from Otta, telling me to give the documents to them, I did not want to open the door for them. I said, no, I will not open. They opened the door themselves. They gave me the letter and they were already in my flat. I knew that I was not to let them enter the room where Josef Šplíchal, the Salesian, had been, because he had his things for the Mass there. They would have arrested him as an illegal priest, because he did not have the official permission for serving as a priest. What I did, therefore, was that I said as if yes, they knew that it was under the bathtub, and no, no, no, it was not under the bathtub, I already went to hide it.”

“He thus led me to Tomášek. I spoke with him. He was kind of naïve, he thought that if he turned the radio on, they would not hear what we were talking about. He was thus playing his tiny radio there and I told him what they had written, and that he must have known for sure that there was no religious freedom in our country. He said: ‘You know, you are right, but we have the strategy.’ I asked him: ‘And is it supposed to be so?’ And he shook his head that it was indeed not. I thus asked him: ‘Why?’ He was greatly encouraged and later he even confirmed me in the chapel and Věra Turková was present there as my godmother. He said: ‘Come anytime, I will be very happy to see you.’ Then I came to him later as the spokesperson for Charter 77 and I asked him for his blessing. He was greatly touched by it, that I – a mother of three children – was giving myself to something so dangerous. And so he gave me his blessing. He said that he had he power to send me for missions. And he thus gave me a special blessing of laying hands and thus he equipped me to be as a missionary in the environment of the Charter as well as in all places where I was.”