Professor PhDr. Tomáš Petráček , Th.D.

“Well, I did not experience childhood and youth somehow ... I do not know what it was, if by some sensitivity, for example the Communist elementary school was hell, to a certain extent. I hated it there, the drill, such spiritlessness. And we had good teachers, it wasn't bad. Still, I was physically sick of the regime. Or the atmosphere in the society. Such general hypocrisy, now the militiamen, the rituals to commemorate the October Revolution, when we had to go to the Red-Army men graves, and all these things... when one knew it was some kind of a system, a system of lies. ”

“The contradiction between the official interpretation of history and the official ideology they taught us in school, and which we constantly perceived from normalization television, where there were at least a few war films every week to remind us of what we owe the Soviet Union. I remember it quite traumatically, because as there were constantly the resistance movements and resistance films, one of my traumas of my whole childhood was that I was getting ready for the situation when some Gestapo come to arrest me and begin to torture me. They would start pushing pins under my nails and pulling my nails, so I must not reveal my friends from the resistance movement at any cost. I was actually preparing for it all the time. I was still not sure if I would fail at this crucial moment or not. It's going to look bizarre to people today, but this was the way how at least I experienced it.”