"I used to meet with Trojan, Kocáb and Dus here when they would came to discuss something and they would stay overnight. And they would always say, 'How is it possible that you can do something like this in here, us being in the Charter...', and so on. I said, 'I'm making an excuse not to sign the Charter, because I've this job going on here for years, and it has been working, it has been, I would say, hiding in the broad daylight.' And if I would do something like you did, I would completely ruin this whole project, and they would eventually take it away from me and they would demolish it.' As was the case of Karásek. He had some contacts with the underground, they were treating them in quite a harsh manner, disregarding the law even. And it wouldn't be a problem to intervene here illegally as well, because the local community looked down on us too."
"And my father got very sick, and then he had several seizures, and they took him to the hospital. But why am I am telling you this? Because it was in 1962 - that's when Dana and I got married and I was finishing tech school and I was about to go to work, to get a job. And my father, he was invited to the Střešovice hospital, in the springtime, they already knew him as they did all the neurological exams, and somehow they were able to locate the centre of the seizures in his brain. He had a seizure while being X-rayed, and they would do this trepanation, they would intervene surgically. It was still so primitive then. Nowadays they do it all with lasers and stuff, but back then they even manage to damage his Broca's speech center somehow, so he had to learn to speak again. When we got married, it was still like this, there was this hole in his forehead. He got rid of it! And he could have spent the rest of his life preaching in Chomutov, which he wished so much at the beginning. And he was in Bystré for three years, at the beginning, that's where I was born. Well, for me it was this kind of an admonition... Of course, I had long forgotten that as boys we wished it so much [for father's recovery] that we would have taken even the preaching : 'Lord God, if it...' It was something totally unimaginable to me at the time that I would ever preach the gospel myself, because we saw it was despised. As a matter of fact, when we said what our father's job was, that he was a preacher, people would just state at us. As our father didn't have a proper job for sure."
"...we promised ourselves that we would use our energy according to the opportunities given to us, we didn't know at the time, when we were coming back, in the 1969, that we would use all our energy to create a place of congregation for all those people who were living apart, or simply those who wanted to be together. There were about 30 people here all summer. They would change every week or two maybe. So the cops were quite interested, the State Security men in the first place. They couldn't understand it. Well, back then there were no trees, it was all bare all the way up to the road; and many times a Trabant car with a diplomatic license plate would stop there and they would be heading towards us. These are just the things you showed me here [ABS photograph]. Well, and they kept thinking that I was going to start some anti-state activities here, and they were actually terribly disillusioned that we were still singing that god old hallelujah and paid no heed to the politics. Just the Bible. Those were strange times, man, it's hard to talk about that that with today's younger generation."
"Well, a couple of days went by and on one occasion, I remember, a neighbor next door - Haužvic was his name - it was a kind of a semi-detached house and he lived in the other part, he was storing this pile of coal he had been delivered. He was an artist, a painter, but he was cleaning a pile of coal and my father started talking to him. Well, now all of a sudden we saw this Kurt [a son of a Gestapo officer] walking from the tram, he was in the Hitler Youth, of course, he had this dagger hanging on his belt. And I, like the fool I was, said to my father: 'That's the one who gave me the beating'. And my father, of course, couldn't resist, and he rushed out to confront him, asked him what it was suppose to mean and everything. He tried to reason with him and he got all cocky, so my father punched him twice in the face and the boy walked away quite angry. Well, that was the incident, and the Germans at that time were very protective of their children, so they came to arrest my father. The Czech policemen came and said, 'It can't be just because of this!' Well, it was. First they wanted to send my father right to the Pankrác prison, and my father knew German, so of course he understood and said that he was not an enemy of the Reich, that he had many friends in Germany, many fellow believers. And Thomson [Kurt's father]: 'Well, let's sort it out then.' So they made my father sit down and started: 'Count!' And they would beat him up so bad that he came home all swollen. But it turned out all right, thank God.
Samuel Jan Hejzlar was born on 14 June 1936 to Bohumila and Samuel Hejzlar from Bystrá u Dobrušky. He spent his childhood in Prague‘s district of Bílá Hora, after the war the family moved to Liberec, where his father was called to serve at a new Protestant congregation. He graduated from grammar school and then from the Faculty of Engineering at the Technical and Textile University in Liberec. In 1957-1959, he did his compulsory military service, during which he underwent a deep inner transformation. The direction of his life was marked by his father‘s unexpected recovery from a serious illness, after which he began to consider working for the Church. In 1962, he married Dana Voříšková, with whom he raised three children. In the 1960s he worked as a teacher at a high school of navigation in Děčín. It was there that he conceived the idea of a journey on European rivers, which he undertook with his students - with the generous help of his German friends - during the holidays of 1969. Shortly after that, he was banned from working in education. He took up the post of an administrator of the Sola Fide Protestant hostel in Janské Lázně, and, again with the help of his German friends, initiated a project to bring together the youth of East and West Germany. When the regime ceased to tolerate this initiative, as did the Church, he found a job at the waterworks and gradually moved those gatherings into the vicinity of the Slapy Dam, where he built a welcoming home both for his family and friends. He received a state permission to work as a priest only in 1986 and was entrusted with the administration of the Beroun congregation; later he was transferred to Dobříš. The house of Samuel and Dana Hejzlar remains a place of gathering up to this day (2023).
