Iva Pospíšilová

"Then I learned that there was a party training for teachers. There was a church secretary there and he talked about how it was necessary to suppress faith in children and not to allow religious instruction, etc., and they talked about me. He reportedly said, 'We'll make short work of it. She hasn't yet understood that in life it's not the way it's taught in schools. And I decided to make her available to the bishop.' And the teachers started laughing. And the church secretary didn't know what for, and all he could think of was, 'But in all fairness, not as you think!' Which put a crown on it and he just disgraced himself. And of course, the teachers told me that this was going to happen, so I called my bishop and said, 'Brother Bishop, I think I'm going to lose my state approval.' But then I learned that it was his ineptitude and the reaction of the teachers that somehow caused the solution to be delayed, I guess they wanted to find something else on me that they didn't have..."

"We had Russian, of course. And there was a big problem to learn Russian, we didn't want to, because we all had already realized what had happened [the 1968 invasion]. And our teacher, Jitka Freuwirthová, said to us, 'Children, if you want to fight against this situation, you have to know the language well.' Because the signs [against the occupation] had mistakes and the Russians made excuses that they didn't understand. So she motivated us in this way that we accepted that we had to keep doing this Russian. But we already had some kind of goal to use it later on for the benefit of that struggle against the Soviets. But the advice was general, because anything that one wants to fight against, one has to know first. And I repeated this statement of hers later at the theological school. We had marxism-leninism, political economy, history of the labour movement, and the train didn't go through that. And I went to another school to take that political economy exam because I wasn't there when it was taken at our school. And there were these scared people sitting there, and when they walked out the door, somebody had mark three, somebody thumbs down and so on. And when I walked out, they asked me, even though they didn't know me, 'What mark?' I said, 'Well, one.' And the examiner, Mr. Kovačovič, asked me, 'How come you, the future parish priest, know it and get one?' And I said to his face, 'Well, you know, if I want to fight against it, I have to know it first.'"