Mgr. Jiří Mach

"In the seventies, all what remained were the perimeter walls and some kind of rubble in the middle, moreover the remains of the roof and everything. Nevertheless, the Germans, the former settlers, were going there and they probably didn't do well at the church. And then the ideological secretary of the Communist Party District Committee [Petr Szimansky], in order to prevent those pilgrimages, decided that the rest of the church would be blown up."

"I'm having a hard time looking for a word to express it, but it certainly wouldn't be flattering. Because my dad remembered - then we talked about it many times - he remembered the year 1938, which he experienced as a sixteen-year-old boy, when suddenly there was such an atmosphere of terrible helplessness, and we experienced that atmosphere too. We knew that what happened here could not be returned, and only the most naive people thought that the troops would withdraw. It was clear here that there was a profound reversal of developments, and no one liked it. And my dad experienced it particularly intensely, because it was repeated for the second time in his life, and if I add Victory February 1948, for the third time. Such a feeling of defeat, a feeling of helplessness that is very frustrating."

"When he got this budget, he got upset and called him, which was very brave at the time, to the secretary, and he told him that nothing would be shot. That if he had 700,000, he needed them for completely different things, such as repairing roads that were in a catastrophic state, and that he would definitely not give them to this purpose. Then it somehow became silent."