"The underground was at that time, when I had experienced it, that means in the time of totalitarianism, it was something remarkable, and it was something completely different than in for example America or the west. And that, which is like the underground here today, is maybe more similar to that, what was in the west. That it is more of a cultural matter. But before it used to be a community knit very tight under the pressure of that totalitarianism. It was a community, which sought out answers to questions, to questions as basic as that of human existence. There were many in that underground, who... many of those strangely educated people, like autodidacts, who really did study philosophy, who were trying to head towards some kind of morality, even though they were not raised in that nor whatsoever erudite."
"It was the time of the operation Asanace, definitely. And that was the operation Asanace, the pressure was greatest at that time, when we were in those Verneřice and at that Robča. Because in between those years eighty and eighty-two probably the greatest number of people left. And that time they did, for one we had those court proceedings, for example about those apples, and back then there were more of the court proceedings. I know, that just the first thing that always happened, they said: 'Ms. Princová, where are your children?" - "When they took you away?" - "Yeah, when they took me away, or when they were simply checking my identity somewhere else. And I found out from the school, that they had also been there to ask around, and so it started to get quite thick around that. And in addition this strange sort of law came out, which I got quite scared by, because it concerned the raising, the need to raise children in the spirit of the socialist arrangement. And so someone would directly... well if some sort of process was begun with the intent of taking away the child, it was not like that. But rather that the pressure was such, that I began to be quite scared for the children. And because Dalibor was going to school, I tried, so that he would simply have everything in order, so that there would not just be some... I think, that everyone in that district was terrified whether something would begin to happen around those children. Because it was of course simple, and so in that everyone was vulnerable, isn't that right?"
“Čuňas went up there to have a look and found out there were bomb everywhere. Tear gas all over, as it is based on a fat substance so it drains slowly, so everything was fatty – children cubes, books. We were washing everything. Dalibor was used to ride his tricycle around the kitchen and he was crying all the time. We could never get it out of the wood properly. In spring we went there together with Dáša Vokatá and scrubbed it properly again. For a couple of last moths we came back to the house.”
“When they were blowing-up our house up in the air in Rychnov, they were guarding the neighbouring roads. Mrs. Boukalová, the neighbour, was sitting right at the window with her grandson, at the side of our house. And they told her nothing, gave no warning. A stone flew in her window and landed on her table. Imagine anything could happened to her or the child.“
“In Verneřice we lived shortly, but quite a lot of people came there. We had a large loft there, where we played theatre. Once I was interrogated and the policeman asked me: ‚So tell me, that´s weird, how come that the house of culture is completely empty and fifty people is rehearsing a theatre play at the Princes?‘ So I replied: ‚You need to answer that for yourself.‘ Opposite to us lived and had a private practice a Jew, Hugo Engelhart, a political prisoner during the Nazis and communists too. He was telling us what the secret police is doing against us: ‚They are wiring you.´ He knew everything.“
Květoslava Princová, née Veselá, was born in 1950 in Lipník nad Bečvou. She studied the High School of Chemistry and Technology in Prague, the field of macro molecular chemistry. In 1970s she me the underground folks in the flat of family Němec. In 1976 together with her husband Jan Princ they bought a house in Rychnov, around which a large community of people from Prague and northern Czech underground gathered, students and youth from Ústí nad Labem, Děčín and Česká Lípa. They organised lectures, concerts, exhibitions and their house also served as an open house for people persecuted by the communist regime. Following a heavy pressure on part of secret police and several brutal attacks the communists expropriated their house without any compensation and blew it up. A similar scenario happened with other hoses of the Princ family - a parish in Robeč and a farmhouse in Mastířovice. In 1986 se Květa and Jan Princ moved out to Nenakonice (part of a village Věrovany) near Olomouc, and have been living there until today. After the velvet revolution the witness participated in the Civic Forum activities, studied the Humanities College, let an office of the Olomouc mayor, worked in charity and co-founded the department of social and humanitarian work. Today she works as a specialised assistant at the Department of Christian Social Work at Palacky University in Olomouc.
