“I started trembling in the car and I thought: They must not see I’m scared. Not that. I was wearing a wide, folding skirt, and I laid it on my knees to hide them trembling. Back then, cars would drive along Lannova Street, normal traffic and all. They turned to Lannova and I knew trouble was ahead since that’s where the police’s regional headquarters were. We arrived, the gate opened, and we just slipped in… See, it’s been almost 40 years since, yet whenever I walk that street and pass that gate, I recall the feeling I had when the gate closed behind me. I was convinced I would never walk out or, maybe, leave only to go to prison. Tremendous panic and fear. They took me to an office and started asking about my birth date and so on. Then it was: ‘How about your religion – what do you do? Tell the truth!’ The interrogation took several hours, and I saw there were others from our group too. The officers brought the records of their interrogations and yelled: ‘You’re lying! Your friend is here, and if only you knew what she said about you!’ It was their typical fashion. No physical violence, they never even touched us, but the psychic pressure was horrific. They took turns: one would say things such as: ‘Come on, we can make it work. Okay, there was this priest who would steer it, and you prayed and you know that’s not allowed.’ I said: ‘We didn’t pray.’ He said: ‘You’re lying!’ I said to myself, not aloud: ‘So what?’ And I kept checking my knees to see if they could see them trembling.”
“The school janitor’s wife, a Russian, was visiting mum. I remember her sitting at the table, crying and saying: ‘They’ll just hate us from now on.’ Mum was sad about it and the janitor’s wife was sad – the atmosphere was so gloomy, I left quickly. Not knowing what to do, I couldn’t think of anything better than going towards the [Czechoslovak] Radio building. The Radio has always resided in U Trojice street. People were hanging around, and the broadcast was on in the street loudspeakers, constantly updating on the movements of the Russian troops. Tanks had already arrived in Budějovice, but we stayed in front of the house. There was a preschool next to the radio house, so the radio employees decided to pretend the preschool was in the radio building. They wanted to keep on broadcasting even if the occupation army came. People started taking children’s benches and wardrobes to the radio building, and the radio pretended to be a preschool for some time. I was just standing there, fascinated by the developments, and I saw the tanks. I actually walked home past the tanks, and I even shouted at a soldier who was watching me from a tank. I knew Russian well, so I shouted in Russian: ‘Invaders, go home!’ He looked at me, and I saw tears rolling from his eyes. He was crying, and everybody around me was sad. I came home; mum had arrived earlier from the afterschool club, she had no idea where I had been, and was terribly worried. The first thing that happened was a slap from my mum – the last in her life, or maybe the last motherly slap in my own life – because she was just so happy to see me alive and well. To me, amidst the general misery, the slap simply sealed the insane feeling of that day: the feeling that the beautiful future I had been building since early childhood was actually over.”
“Imagine the mix of it all in my head as a child: ‘The communists are very evil, but they also have this beautiful idea that is worth doing something for.’ And on the other side: ‘The Christians who should be all good do not treat us all that well. It hurts mum, but then again, there are others who behave like they should.’ How is a child supposed to process it? Now that you’ve led me to remember this, I think it was sort of ‘double-edged’ for us children. On the one hand, we learned how to navigate this world, we made it ‘one’, but on the other hand, we never really felt good on either side. The socialist world was not supposed to know that we went to church. We had to keep that secret, and when they found out, they scorned us. The Christian world was sometimes utterly beautiful, but also hurtful at other times. We encountered informers and people who shunned mum in the street for fear of being seen in contact with her. They were those who were in the underground church; we were not at the time. But they were, organising secret religion classes or preparing their children for the Sacrament of Confirmation, and that was something they definitely had to conceal from the official communist authorities. They had their own serious reasons for avoiding us. As a result, we sort of existed only halfway everywhere. One foot in the socialist world and school, and the other in the world of Christianity. But we felt really ‘at home’ only in our own home, inside our own family.”
Ludmila Muchová, née Rynešová, was born in Tachov on 25 January 1953. She grew in South Bohemia, initially in the village of Kamenný Újezd and later in České Budějovice. Her parents František and Marie Ryneš were both teachers and active Roman Catholics. They brought their four children up with Christian values. Ludmila’s childhood was framed by the conflicting atmosphere of the 1950s, an era of the government-proclaimed joyful journey towards socialism as well as show trials and the ubiquitous fear and anxiety. When the communists gained power, they started systematically suppressing church representatives as well as any and all church practices that might be out of their control. That caused multiple problems for the Ryneš family. First, Ludmila’s mother had to leave her teacher job, and the father had to vacate the headmaster position later on as well. Ludmila wanted to work with children when adult but was forbidden to study towards the job because of her faith, first at a grammar school and then a faculty of education. As a result, she joined a business academy in September 1968, just days after the invasion of Warsaw Pact armies into Czechoslovakia. The 1968 occupation was a huge trauma for her; one she found difficult to process. At that time, she began attending religion lessons in České Budějovice, taught by young priest Miloslav Vlk who was also the secretary to Bishop Josef Hlouch. Thanks to them, Ludmila got an entirely new view of Christianity and faith. Both clerics were under constant State Security (StB) surveillance, however, and StB started to target the group of young people under Miroslav Vlk’s spiritual guidance. In this context, Ludmila was first interrogated at age 18. The constant StB surveillance, the impossibility gain fulfilment in her own job, and the absence of pure faith caused Ludmila depression. She found some fulfilment when working in a children’s shelter as a guide, and also during her part-time studies of psychology at the university in Brno later on. She could not pursue her desired educational job until after the fall of the communist regime. Miloslav Vlk became the new Bishop of České Budějovice in 1990 and offered her a role in re-introducing religious education to schools. The foundation of the Faculty of Theology at the University of South Bohemia was the summit of her professional career and gave her satisfaction. She was involved in the Faculty’s founding, worked there as a teacher, and pursued scholarly work. Ludmila Muchová currently lives in Brno (2022) and is married. She and her husband have raised three children together.
