"I wrote a few lines like this for that first meeting of our province. First, so that we would not give in to enthusiasm. That anyway, though now they look upon us sympathetically, so that for the most part we remain a non-religious atheist state. That we are not to take advantage of that sympathy, we are to act not as owners of the truth, but as seekers of the truth, because we are seeking the truth too, we are not the owners. And I had a couple of comments like that. That simply not to stand out on our own merits as some orders, especially those that have been rather passive, have done, but rather to leave it to others to call us out. Leave the initiative to them. Well, yes, there is a rule: 'Don't talk about the Lord God unless they ask, but act so that they ask'. And when they do ask, you get so horny you'd include them. So that's what I wrote there - to answer in one sentence and leave the others free to ask more questions or not."
"That's what I said when I went to Russia for three months to work as a consultant for the Academy. They were theoretical mathematicians, many of them much better than me, but they had no practice. We had computers and we were tightening up. Well, so our State Security officers instructed the KGB to follow me. And they respected academia. They didn't go inside the Academy, they asked the party bosses and those collaborators. Well, yeah, but I published three papers there with the chairman of the Communist Party, we were friends, so he gave them an excellent answer, 'Please don't bother him with this religious stuff, he didn't spread anything here. When we asked him, he answered the questions quite openly, that he was a believer, etc., but don't bother him, his work is so important to us that he shouldn't be disturbed!'"
"Since I made no secret of the fact that I was a believer, the head of the education department in Polička came to the high school and said he could not give me a recommendation for college. But it was so God-directed that at that time there was a broadcast of Moscow for Czechoslovakia, on Sundays, a half-hour program, I don't know exactly. And they were just broadcasting about our family, in February 1955, where they said, 'Eight children, poverty in general, and they were feeding three Russian paratroopers since February 1944', now they praised us there. So it was socially unbearable for a person with such a background - my dad worked in a stone quarry, my mum was at home with us - so overall the cadre background was good, I didn't have a bad cadre report, not to be allowed to go to university for political reasons when Moscow was praising us, right? So the school boss said, 'Okay, let's let him go to the university, give him a recommendation, but he mustn't study a field where he would come into contact with people.'"
"When the war ended, those three Russians came, already decorated with medals, it was around May 10th, 1945. So there were eleven of us, eight children, my grandmother, my parents, then the three Russians. So my mother made potato soup and doughnuts, and we sat outside and ate. We started, and out of the woods, where it was about fifty meters, on three sides a house surrounded by woods, on one side a meadow, two young Germans came out. Well, boys, prisoners. So: 'Germans, there´s going to be shooting. Let's shoot them!' Dad said, 'Why would you shoot them? What do you know about them?' Muy served with the Germans, here in Prague, so she spoke German. They were boys from Svitavy region, coming back from the war. So dad says, 'Remember how shaken up you were when you signed up a year and a quarter ago? So here's a bumag and you write that these are normal German boys coming back from the war, and they're glad that the war is over. So that some fool like you doesn't want to shoot them either.' They sat down at our table and had lunch with us."
Josef Šplíchal was born on 1st March 1937 in Polička to Štěpán and Františka Šplíchalovi. He spent his childhood in the forests of Vysočina, in a secluded place called Pasíčka, near Proseč. After graduating from the Polička grammar school, he graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics and started his scientific career at the Research Institute of Iron Metallurgy. From his grammar school years he maintained intensive contact with the secretly active members of the Salesian Order, of which he became a member in 1960. He was ordained a priest after completing his theological studies in Rome in 1968. For his activities within the hidden church, he soon came under State Security’s radar. His reputation in professional circles and his collaboration with the Soviet Academy of Sciences protected him from serious sanctions. During the period of normalisation he was in charge of the organisational aspect of the theological studies of the Salesian Order. After November 1989, he headed the Department of Higher Education at the Ministry of Education and became officially involved in pastoral ministry and teaching.
