Petr Bechyňák

"I started attending the school of engineering in 1968, so it was great there. But already there I noticed that they were gradually tightening the gears they wanted to grind us between. For example, when I went to the third grade, that is, in the year 1973, my son of Milouš Jakeš, a young Jakeš joined us and began tidying up. He began to promote the Socialist Youth Union, and suddenly a rule was applied that whoever was not in the Youth Union would not graduate. Which was rather a complicated matter. However, my classmates laughed very loudly until March 1972; in June we graduated and in March they all flocked to the SSM, two of them went straight to the Communist Party. And there were two of us left out, also Jirka Culka, who did not join SSM. Still, we graduated, and both did very well."

"Grandpa and Grandma, Dad and Mom, and we were are all practising Catholics. I started to visit the church at about the age of six. And my family quite regularly enrolled us in religion. It was an optional subject at school and I remember, when I was already making sense of it all; in the ninth grade we went to school in Balabenka. There, the director had only four applications for religion, from us, from the Bechyňák family. What we had to suffer from him, what our parents had to stand is hard to imagine. He was my physical education teacher, for example, and even though I wasn't particularly clumsy at the time, I think I was quite good at sports, and he kept yelling at me. He said 'wrong', so he shouted at me, 'Practice properly, churchman!' But that was just one of them. Of course, because we were like black sheep at school, and of course children teased us. And I can say that over time their aversion turned into a positive attitude. When we met years later, rather older, they spoke quite respectfully about being believers as such.”