Ing. Pavol Hric

"That's where I met Dr. Jukl. At first, I was suspicious that what this guy was doing here, that we are the only students here, and he's some fifty-year-old man walking with us on the hills, and he was still singing a song called Neďaleko Bohumína, the girl fell into the chimney . So he came here to sing with us? But suddenly, when I had the opportunity to talk with him on that trip, or otherwise, we found out that he is a serious person. He was in prison for fourteen years and he was understandable, he did not interpret in some unintelligible concepts. But mainly it was a personal testimony. Of course, it was almost as if he always carried the memory of Professor Kolakovič, who actually introduced him to the life of the secret church, that how can one survive when that communism is an atheistic state , when he is constantly liquidating those believers. So that was my discovery in Bratislava. So, in addition to the professional education I received there, I also received a fairly decent education. You can probably say that to humanity, decency and finally, when I look at it this way, we are in those circles, in those communities, they were free. We didn't have censorship there, we read everything there. Usually it wasn't from our labels. But it was smuggled literature, samizdata, copied books, and later also those periodical samizdat magazines."

"And I don't think they did it because they needed all those things so urgently, but rather I think it was the humiliation that we will show you who has the power here and if you don't sign, then I don't know yet what. There were even direct death threats, thank God it didn't happen. But it was a difficult time. And now a family without these agricultural products, without chickens, eggs, milk, it was a terrible prospect. Terrible. Father also had health problems. Mentally it was just very hard for him to bear it. Mother, probably with such a drive for preservation, first went somewhere in a neighboring village to work part-time on some state property, then to a sugar factory in Trebišov. And she actually became the main breadwinner of the family. So the family's punishment was great. And more apart from the physical, the nutrition and so on, the designation kulak, even though the regulation or the law, the kulak was supposed to be the one who had more than twenty hectares of land and who employed. But ours had nothing like that. They had those seasonal helpers at the harvest or during harvest. But the label kulak stuck with me. I'm the son of a kulak, and it's simply a pejorative term for the fact that my father was a farmer and a peasant."

"So I think I belong to a generation, so I'll take the liberty of summarizing it a bit. We were lucky enough to live to see the days when freedom was born in Slovakia. And even today I will say that as long as we have freedom, we have a chance to improve our democratic system, which is, one might say, on straw legs... we see that democracy is somehow not working for us, or we don't even want to learn or that much we don't want to be democrats either. Because rather when someone grabs that power, so they doesn't want to let go... on the one hand, we are a generation of hope that my parents didn't live to see... even though mom lived, but you can say she didn't enjoy it anymore... she didn't have the feeling that yes, I can implement. People in their seventies already had a slightly different view of the world than maybe us in our thirties... and my father didn't live to see it, but I think that if he had lived, he would have warned me: "don't do anything, don't get involved in anything". ... they got it like that in 1968... they really caught on in the 1950s... that was a generation to be respected. Really, these victims and their attitude to those wrongs, to those lies and cruelties, that they prevented it as much as possible."

"Well, since religion was not taught in schools at that time in Košice... in many cities and villages, the parents fought for it, even though it was not allowed... both parents had to bring an application to the director, stating that they both wanted the child went to religion class... but it wasn't in Košice. I know this because I had a colleague at work who said that he insisted that his child attend religion at school. He knows that it can be done in other ways, by visiting houses or by calling a chaplain, but he wants to and has a civil right to do so... well, I learned from him that the chaplains have already dissuaded him, that: "But let that's right, we'll come to you"... no, he wanted to exercise such a civil right. Today, we may smile so much that it was necessary to fight for such elementary rights. However, religious freedom in the socialist Czechoslovakia, even though it was declared, was not in reality. Because we didn't have any literature, we didn't even have any religious books... just once in a while something came out in the Society of St. Vojtech, but there was an absolute lack of anything related to any kind of education. Whether in that Christian modernity as in poetry or in prose works and so on. Well, it all had to be secured somehow..."

"I think that we, who grew up in the environment of the secret church, just as we are sitting here now, some priest in civilian clothes could also sit here and talk to us. This means that we were consired as partners, even apart from the fact that they were in charge of the spiritual service, confessions, holy masses or the liturgy of prayer... no one would have recognized that this is a layman and this is a priest... because when it was said, that we are going to print, publish or copy some videos and distribute them... so it was the task of this or that, but it was not accepted that you are a priest and you cannot do this... after the year 1990, the first thing I experienced was the division , that those secret priests or priests who lived in the lay world had to or wanted to withdraw into the sacred environment. Well, they left us here to take care of this world... it was such a surprise to me that I never had such a close relationship with priests as I had during the time of the secret church."