"At the end of the eighties, as all those samizdat publications came to us, among them were many, many different petitions – Několik vět, for the release of Mr. (Augustin) Navrátil. (Pavel) Wonka, (Ivan) Polanský... I still have photographs somewhere at home. With these petitions we went around to relatives, acquaintances, people we trusted. The truth is that some of them signed it in a fit of enthusiasm and then came to us to ask us to take them out of it. But it had already been sent. Some got scared after that. Even in the 1988 and 1989 people were still afraid. But here the petitions were being signed. It went in droves. Not long ago I came across a sheet called ‘Několik vět’ at home.”
"Even though they knew about us, they didn't pick us, but one someone called and an unknown voice, who introduced himself as a friend, asked my husband to come out. It was in the evening, sometime at nine or ten o'clock. He already thought it was suspicious, but he went out and there was a secret agent waiting for him in the car and he drove him to Račice in the woods and there, well, he just said in a friendly way that he wanted to advise us to be careful, that he knew that an important person was coming to our place the next day and that we were gathering young families there and that we were doing some anti-state activity with him and that he was only giving us good advice. But it was clear to us that he knew about us completely. So, we proceeded to destroy compromising materials by morning, tearing, plucking, and most importantly, my husband went around telling all the people who were to come to us the next day not to come. And only maybe one family came, he was not able to reach them on the phone, and we packed some more stuff for them to take back to their homes."
"It so happened that Father Josef Zvěřina came to us. We got to know each other and we hit it off, we became friends in a very human way. He impressed me a lot because he also studied art history and had a deep knowledge not only theological, but also philosophical and in terms of art. So, we had long conversations and we agreed that he would come again. And so it happened that he began to come to us, and he came to us for those ten years until his death. He became a family friend. He fit in with our family and we agreed to organize these apartment groups where we would invite some friends and he would lecture on theology, dogmatics. At first it started kind of quietly and we didn't even know what we were getting into, but because my husband and I were very interested, caught up, excited, we basically adapted our whole life to it. It's always been a preparation from one lecture to the next. These were mostly weekend events. Later on, because of the disclosure, it happened in different places in the Šumperk region, in the Zábřeh region, in cottages, in different apartments, but it was always based in our place. Thanks to that we met a lot of great people who then helped us to distribute various samizdat, various literature, textbooks were reproduced and distributed. After that, other people like Father Oto Mádr also came to us."
Jitka Srovnalová was born on 12 April 1953 in Šumperk as the eldest of three children to parents Alois Frank and Zdenka Franková. Her father joined the resistance during World War II and spent nearly a year in Nazi prisons. He continued to have difficulties after the communist regime took over. In 1948, the Action Committee expelled him from the University of Veterinary Sciences, which he was able to complete only after several years of working as a labourer. Jitka spent a large part of her childhood in Jeseník, where her father worked as the head of the veterinary centre and where she graduated from grammar school. After graduating, however, due to her father’s involvement during the Prague Spring, she was not recommended for university. It was only after a year as a worker that she was able to attend the Faculty of Arts at Jan Evangelista Purkyně University (today’s Masaryk University), where she studied art history and ethnography. In 1976 she married František Srovnal, with whom she moved to Prague. During their stay in Prague, they made many lifelong friendships in the local community of believers, including among the Catholic dissenters. In 1980 the family with their two children moved to Zábřeh. Over the years, Jitka Srovnalová brought five more children into the world. In November 1980, her five-year-old son Jakub accidentally drowned in a well. In their house in Zábřeh, the family held seminars, distributed samizdat, anti-communist petitions and religious literature. Josef Zvěřina, a Roman Catholic priest and one of the leading figures of Catholic dissent, secretly lectured theology and dogmatics at their house for ten years. In November 1989, the married couple attended the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia in Rome. There they also learned about the demonstration on the Národní třída. In the early 1990s, her husband was elected mayor of Zábřeh. Jitka Srovnalová then worked for ten years as a preservationist in Mohelnice. At the time of recording in 2022, she and her husband were still living in Zábřeh.
