"Then my father pointed out that there were interesting seminars in Jircháře, that I would definitely be interested. So, I started attending seminars in Jircháře." - "Were those Jircháře Thursdays?" - "Yes. That was before 1968. Of course, I made a lot of other contacts there." - "Who did you meet there, who inspired you?" - "My friend Václav Frei, his friends Jan Sokol went there - I knew him thanks to Souček when he went to Souček´s place. He was in the [New Testament] translation group. That's how I met Jan Sokol. Then Jiří Němec. Lots of people went there. The Technical Auxiliary Battalions men who were in the war with Václav Frei, Professor Karel Floss and other acquaintances of his." - "Newly released Catholic prisoners of the 1950s also came there." - "Of course: Josef Zvěřina, Antonín Mandl, Jaroslav Vrbenský and others." - "What did it give you?" - "It was a huge window opening. They talked about foreign authorities and theologians. Ráner… I would gradually recall them now. Professor Souček's important colleagues also went there. Professor Hromádka started the seminar, but then he handed it over to his closest collaborator Souček. So, basically Souček organized it.
"After the war, shortly after the war, my classmate from Vršovice - we sat together at a school desk and made friends – he told me that he went to the church in Vršovice and if I would like to go too. So, I said I would go minister too. My dad came with us - we lived in Ruská, and it is on the border with Vinohrady. We went to Vinohrady for Mass, to the Sacred Heart of the Lord, and after Mass we always went there to play on the swings. It was such an attraction. That friend took me to the parish in Vršovice. And that affected me, I'd say, for life. Because there was a ministrant group, there was a lot of the ministrants, and there was a ministry called Legio angelica. It was founded before the war by the Benedictine Emmaus, Father Metod Klement. His pupil, Father Josef Gabriel, was the director of the Legio angelica. He lived at the parish near the Sacred Heart of the Lord in Vinohrady. We had this ministrant group, which was strongly supported by the great parish priest of Vršovice, Father Stanislav Pilík. He came from Kladno during the First Republic. He saw misery there; he was close to the working environment. He came to Vršovice, where the parish was at St. Nicolas (now it is called Vršovické náměstí). He founded an association for the construction of a new church and built the church of St. Wenceslas. They chose Josef Gočár in the architectural competition. It was a beautifully built church where we went to minister. We also went to the old church. I later read about this pastor Pilík that during the Protectorate he was hiding some resistance group there, which met in the church of St. Wenceslas. It is built uphill (normally churches are built with an altar to the east) and on the north side there is the so-called funeral chapel. There was also a so-called singing hall, a common room. The resistance organization met there during the protectorate. The pastor was great, he supported the ministrant group. There were a maximum of about fifty of us, we were divided into smaller groups. It was done according to scout rules. We went on trips along Botič, we went through everything. And after February, Father Gabriel organized a ministerial camp under Křemešník, under the heading of the Forest Brigade. I was there twice."
The physicist Vladimír Roskovec was born on January 22, 1937 in Prague, in the family of an insurance officer. He was brought up in the Catholic faith and as a child he began to minister in the church of St. Nicholas and St. Wenceslas in Vršovice, where he also took part in the activities of the ministrant group Legio angelica. Meetings of the ministrants continued even after 1948, during the holidays they went to summer camps under the heading of forest brigades. After graduating from high school in 1955, Vladimír Roskovec joined the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University, where he focused on studying solid state physics. After graduation, he joined the Institute of Solid State Physics, where he focused on research into ferrite magnetism. While studying at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Vladimír Roskovec met his future wife, Lydia, the daughter of J. B. Souček, a prominent evangelical New Testament expert. They got married on April 7, 1964, and their three sons were baptized in Catholic churches, but raised in an evangelical church in Střešovice, of which Lydia was a member. Since 1979, Vladimír Roskovec worked at the Research Institute of Mathematical Machines, which focused on the development of the first Czechoslovak computers. At the time of normalization, he took part in some anti-regime activities, such as demonstrations during the Palach’s week. After November 1989, he joined the Ministry of Education as the director of the organizational and administrative department. He participated in the transformation of universities into public institutions. After leaving the ministry, he worked as the director of the Jabok Higher Vocational School or as the secretary of the Evangelical Faculty of Theology.
