Josef Kyska

"We were trained like that from the very beginning, no first names and certainly no last names. Telephone numbers as far as possible should only be remembered, not written down. Addresses as far as possible should also be remembered, not written down. If we had to have addresses, we were expected to reduce the notes in order to not endanger anyone. Because there were a lot of students who were actually regular students. I only had links to them, in that I wasn't a student, but I was already working. I was just friends with them. For many of them, it resulted in expulsion from their studies. Not only from the faculty, but they were unable to study at any university in the whole of Czechoslovakia. So the measures were very, very strong. We often didn't even know the surname. Just this is Maja, this is Beata - who? It was so deliberately done, God forbid that somebody should give somebody away. The caution was great, because the church, and the underground church in general, was the number one enemy of the state. Of course there was the official church, it could say masses and that was all. This [the underground church] was beyond the control of state security. The state security was interested in infiltrating. Amazingly, it also worked in such a way that the state security tried to infiltrate and plant its spies among these young people. It really worked amazingly well that immediately there was a warning, I remember it to this day, as the photo was circulating, watch out for this one, he's a spy. What channels it went through - I don't know."