Josef Baierl

"We didn't sing until January. I sent it in good faith to my superiors at the school district office as an invitation. They turned it into something else. There was a new inspektor. She invited school principals, cultural workers and me to the meeting hall in Susice. I had no idea what was going on. I came there, they gave me a chair opposite them. She started that she had received this invitation and that we had songs inappropriate for children to sing. I asked what kind. 'You sang Heavenly Cavaliers.' - 'Okay,' I said, 'but that's a piece from the Adam Michna cycle from Otradovice, which has been sung for [a long time], he was also the greatest Baroque poet.' - 'But that's a religious piece! And then here, what about this Rorando Coeli...!' - 'That's a Latin piece, I heard it on the radio yesterday' - 'Let them play it, but it won't be sung here!'"

"I was there until 1968, and the party started talking to the youth. It was a great political action. A comrade from Klatovy came and got all the members of the Youth Union together and got the young teachers to join in, it would be good for them to be there. But they miscalculated. At the meeting we took the floor one after the other. We definitely assessed that the party had lost confidence, and so. Even one member of our choir, to this day he's still a Communist, even he spoke like that. Whereupon the comrade from Klatovy dissolved the meeting, he kept us there. And he said, 'Comrades, you have studied pedagogy and psychology and you don't know that you mustn't talk like that in front of young people?' The first to leave the school was the headmaster. He was sent to Nýrsko as a representative of the school. I applied to Sušice, where I wanted to start a choir. So they sent me to Petrovice. Only two remained there."