“Anarchy, it was complete anarchy. I didn’t personally take part in it. After November 17th, all kinds of riots took place… Our unit was fairly small, but altogether there were four units in Janovice comprising a total of some four thousand men. Janovice village had a population of a thousand people who were mostly military men with their families, so there were hardly any civilians. For instance, the soldiers would run to the roll-call area, tear off their uniforms and demand a premature release, shorter service and so on. There was a lot of spontaneous action. But it had nothing to do with me, as far as I was concerned, the revolution had already taken place. All it was, was pressure for the military service to be shortened, which in the end happened. They cut it short by a month or two.”
“In military service, I had two major run-ins with army officers. The first took place right after I had signed the ‘A Few Sentences’ (Několik vět) manifesto. I was an executive warrant officer, and I was in charge of two warehouses and an office. The deputy commander who was in charge of political education, major Kratochvíl, turned up. He searched my premises. He searched the whole warehouse, inch by inch. He was looking for something of interest to him. And I had a breviary, which is a thick book of prayers, kicking around, plus there were various illegal books from the West, samizdat church journals and Charter 77 documents. But what really angered him was the Independent Peace Movement bulletin because he knew it opposed the army. He was shocked. He started rummaging through it and then screaming it was a criminal offence and he was going to have me imprisoned. He roared at me for a while. I was also in a state of shock as I hadn’t envisaged this. I was fully aware that I was in bad trouble but throughout my life, my strategy has always been to face the music, so I let him roar. And then gradually I started taking over, telling him that military service wasn’t my idea, that from the word go I had always openly declared who I was, that it was them who had installed me where they had, and that it was their problem, not mine. This is how I started to defend myself. In the end, he spoke to me almost amicably, advising me to see the military service through, seeing as my release from the army was so close, and saying that he, too, was only human…”
“I was genuinely surprised by the enormous power I felt, as particularly the military service for me was a nightmare. I served in Janovice nad Úhlavou. What I was going through there was far from pleasant. Lots of liminal situations. Nevertheless, the liminal situations made me realise what I wanted, and that was incredibly empowering. And where did that power come from? It didn’t stem from history but rather from an intimate spiritual source. The way I saw it, it was a sudden epiphany, a spiritual experience which shed light on my life as I had led it so far. It was a matter of seconds during which a particular thing happened. I was not alone. It’s been described and studied in various psychological analyses. They call it illumination, enlightenment. It was a moment which filled me with an incredible sense of purpose. All of a sudden, everything made sense. And it wasn’t rational, it wasn’t the case of me thinking about the meaning of life and then working it out. That wasn’t the case. It was on the level of an incredible spiritual experience, which actually kept me going for many years to come. Suddenly, I had this superpower which helped me survive particularly challenging situations, such as the military service in Janovice nad Úhlavou. If I didn’t have that, many things would have happened differently. I’d like to relive it but it’s not happening anymore. In that respect it was a unique experience.”
Petr Sýkora was born on August 30, 1966, in Chrudim into the family of Josef Sýkora, an academic painter and forester, who was in 1953 sentenced to nineteenth months in prison in a show trial. Petr’s mother worked as a forestry worker. Petr spent his childhood and youth with three older siblings and his parents in Bojanov. The family were religious, and Petr was substantially formed by people from the underground church. From the age of thirteen, he was in regular touch with the members of the Salesian Order. In 1985, he started studying at special-needs teacher-training faculty in Prague. During a national pilgrimage to Velehrad, he met the dissident Tomáš Dvořák, at whose house he was later temporarily living. Petr visited Poland, where he discovered the Solidarity Movement, started taking an interest in the rights of the unjustly prosecuted and participated on the trial with the Jazz Section. In 1986, he decided to join a priests’ seminar in Litoměřice, and he left the teacher-training faculty. In the spring of 1988, his obligatory two-year military training started. He was stationed in Janovice nad Úhlavou with a recon unit, the so-called Red Berets. He witnessed the dramatic events of November 1989 in his military service. He was dismissed from the army in February 1990 and started working in the Civic Forum’s coordination centre. Between 1990-1991, he was studying in the seminar in Litoměřice, and then continued his studies for two years in Rome, where he got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Afterwards, he entered a Jesuit novitiate in Kolín. During his training at a residential care home in Velehrad, he met a nurse who he married six months later. In 2023, he was living in Prague and, along with his son, doing business in the field of cyber security with Hexagon.
