Josef Sedlák

"Daddy liked to play jokers with us at home. And one day he came in and said, 'Well, something's going on outside, we have to go out.' We were very proud of that. It was raining then, we went to the square, there was a big gathering of people, and I have deep memories of that. I was quite a sensitive person, I was very much looking around. I appreciate additionally my father that he never led us, I don't remember, for example, German rally or in the square, which was Hitler Youth or something like that. He probably protected us from that in some way. And this memory, when we were in the square afterwards and the national anthem started to be sung, there was this man standing next to me and tears were coming out of his eyes, I can see him like today. I was also painfully affected by it and we just experienced it like that, well."

"We were a religious family, very religious. I spent a lot of time there at the parish of St. James from a very young age, because when I was very young, five years old, I started to be an altar boy there, and practically my whole youth was spent there - at the Premonstratensian parish. I remember all the events that happened there. I liked horses, so there was a coachman Sýkora next to me, so I liked to go to all the horses or with the boys to play football, it was a really beautiful youth."

"There was one who was also tried, the theology student, Honza Chmelař. And he was with me in the cell. I was glad that he suddenly came to my cell. Then when we came back home, he came back from the prison too. And one day he said he needed to talk to me, you know, his conscience wouldn't let him. Conscience, it's a wily little thing, if you train it well, it's a great help. And he came to tell me that they had put him there to guard me, to question me. He just needed to apologize to me in some way. I said, 'Honza, you don't have to apologize.' I wasn't moved or even surprised because I knew they were capable of anything. So we sorted it out and we continued to be friends."

"Well, the beginning of our arrest was that there were no books, so it was copied on a typewriter. Dr. Chastr was here, Dr. Kubíček and Dr. Gronátová, they wrote a book on marriage. We copied it. Or just some religious literature, we typed it out six or seven times, and we put it among us like that. They went searching for this and they were terribly bothered that we were gathering there, so they put a listening device on us. In that one room, the girls had one room, Marta lived here and Marie lived there. And I used to go there as if it was my home. So one time, Marie was doing something, and I was sitting there on the ottoman, and I was looking at the ceiling, and I said, 'Hey, Marie, there's a little hole there, it's never been there.' Looked like a fresh plaster, we knew their tricks. 'I'm going up to the attic, and you're going to bang here, and I'm going to look for it.' So I went up to the attic and she was banging. I found the floor tile, I took the tile out and suddenly I saw wires. I took out this pear-shaped microphone, and there was a hole made in the ceiling and that's where it was laid. Come on - I was eighteen or nineteen years old - so I wasn't even... first of all, I started swearing in there, asking if there was anybody on the other side listening to me, so I was telling them, I don't know the exact words anymore, maybe it was a little un-Christian. But I was just relieved, I ripped the microphone off and carried it down."

"I was walking out of the cemetery one day, and there they were standing. The only water that was running was in that tap in the cemetery. And the German soldiers, the captured ones, they were standing around that fence all the way down to somewhere like the Masaryk School stop today, I don't know how far. And I went from that, now I saw one there, he was leaning against the wall, he must have fainted, so it was such a shocking experience, you know. So I was there, what I saw was that they were at their worst before they got to the tap, so I was there again drawing water and bringing it to them like that, to the most needy ones in that line. So I felt sorry for the people who were suffering from that. And somehow, as a kid, I wasn't able to enjoy that freedom the way the grown up people were able to enjoy it."