Mgr. Petr Váňa

„This man was a volunteer. We went to Sušice with our Škoda car on Friday, it was very cold, and we hung posters there. It was so cold that the pins wouldn’t hold. It was better to spit on it and stick it so that the poster would freeze. Sometime one night, the cops stopped us, patrolling and asked what we were doing. There was nothing there in Sušice, it was tough there. And as it was cold, I said to the policeman, 'We're hanging posters and we can't do it at all, maybe you could help us, no?' The policeman said, 'I don't know, I don't know. Just finish up quickly then!’ This is how the revolution began in Sušice. The cops didn't help us, but they didn't arrest us. The next day there was a meeting on the square in Sušice and I spoke there as a student from Prague.“

„Nobody scolded us politically. The only problem was that at that time there was some action that all the students had to sign to agree to the deployment of missiles here. So my friend and I didn't sign it. We said no, which maybe also became a problem for our professors. So we got a C for behaviour and a conditional suspension. We lived in that private house and it looked like they were going to kick us out of school. It wasn't easy and this one professor always supported us and it was amazing.“

„Well, it was a problem, because then I found out what it was like. There was a man there, always standing by the church, watching who was going in and who was not. I remember that when I was somewhere in the third grade, I was a pretty little munchkin, so the local teacher put me on the podium in civics or whatever it was, some third or fourth grade. And there she said in front of the class, 'There are still people who go to church, you see here,' and in front of the class she asked me, 'What are you going to tell us?' I didn't know what to say. That's how they scolded us for being weird.“

„They took part in it, of course, watching what I came up with. On the other hand, the stone was within reach, I finally finished it, that part was done. But in the end that part of the shaft was budgeted for 700 thousand crowns. I did it for a price of one and a half million, counting all those crazy costs. So I made a deal with them that they would only pay part of it, that they would give only what was in the budget and I would pay everything that went over the budget. What was stupid though was that I didn't have the money. We had a complete zero at home then and now, what to do? But it so happened that my wife inherited a house from her father, who had just left this world. She inherited the house near Kladno with her sister, no one wanted to live there. She and her sister agreed to sell it, and half of the house paid for this adventure.“