Václav Wagner

"They tried to present the ambush somehow… so that… It‘s my personal view. But, to make an excuse for storming in bedrooms of young people or children, and with all that clamour – that they’re looking for weapons. And, allegedly, student by the name Pavel Kučera, later a monsignore and a great Church dignitary, so, he shouted out in the dining room that no, no weapons, that he saw them moving the weapons in the building. I thought then, ‘Well, Pavel, now they’ll beat you to pulp’ but they let that be. And then there was a speech by one of those and he actually said that only now, our eyes will open to see the real word, that there’ll be no lies of the shavelings. That they saved us from the hands of, don’t know who it was supposed to be.”

“When I talk to some of my schoolmates or peers, everyone was homesick because an 11-year-old boy… and the discipline in the boarding school was indeed Jesuit style, like in the army.” “And sorry for interrupting you, it was a Jesuit school?” (Gymnasium – eight-year school for children from the 5th grade, which had served as preparatory school for university studies, thus with a heavy stress on academic subjects.) “Yep, Jesuit. Then, judging after all these years, it was a school that provided us with some knowledge, from the first grade on, we had Latin. Then there was Greek, too. French from the beginning, from the fourth grade, there was English. At that time, foreign languages were not widely taught. And the teachers were really great, they were on the level of university professors.”