Jan Ihnát

"I thought about it a lot and I concluded that it doesn't matter before God because, before God, small or big love applies. But I don't consider it as some do... I naively assumed that I had experience, that I knew life, that I had worked and so on. Well, but when a person comes to you after fifty years for confession, that's an experience you won't get anywhere. That is, that time was instructive, but it cannot be absolutized, because it is nothing absolutely by itself. That is, some people were in the concentration camp and didn't learn at all, there were people in prison who didn't learn either, because to learn is to be enlightened, to see the thing in a broader context."

"The way it was done was that if someone wanted to tell someone something, they either visited in person, or in the extreme case, the telephone was used, but only using code words. But otherwise, everybody had a calendar, it said, 'There's going to be a meeting there and there between Christmas...', and everybody had to make arrangements to go. I think some of the hiding was unnecessary because they had people right in our midst. So they were concerned about it not spreading too much. A few people were...but every one of us, when we joined the Salesians, they told them you have to expect that you might get run over by a car. Nobody knew how the situation would turn out."

"In that year of sixty-seven to sixty-eight, it was possible to get some books from Rome, so the world began to open up to me. And then I also listened to the radio Free Europe, right, so I was bred later. Well, and when I got into those circles that were studying secretly, I was staying with the Zideks in Ostrava, for example. Mr Žídek is today a kind of unofficial chairman of political prisoners, Leo Žídek. So, whenever I needed a chat: 'Here are your keys...'. So I thought, 'If he, who was in jail for ten years, is not afraid, why should I be afraid?' Well, so it was like that. You were in it and you had the impression that everybody was against the regime and so on... There was a policy of not being political because you knew there might be people amongst us... Yeah, just the focus here was to do good, to keep the families in their faith, to devote themselves to the youth, and this and that."