“My mom told me that I had been walking with her a lot, we used to sing a lot. I was a little girl and I was a very cute girl with blond hairs and I was not timid at all. When I walked with my mom through the town as she was doing some shopping, I was singing: ‘Sentry is standing by our barracks in the evening, don’t wait for us, Adolf, you would wait in vain. Come, Adolf, early in the morning, you will be welcomed by a cannon ball, we will start marching. Come and march with us, Áda, and have some fun as well. When bombs drop from the sky at night, you get one, too. Your head will get hit, and no one will repair it. Your whole troop will see our soldiers fighting bravely.’ I was singing this song with passion and Nazis were walking by. They stayed in the schoolhouse for some time, and we then had our classes in the town hall instead. They were looking at me with admiration and praising me ‘schöne,’ meaning that I could sing very well, they were telling my mom. My mom was about to faint at the thought of them having a clue what I was singing about.”
“But he (Otta Ornest – ed.’s note) visited me immediately before and he told me that he needed to hide those things. We thus hid them under the bathtub. Then they arrested him and right in the morning I knew that he had been arrested. Now I was worried about what to do with those things hidden under the bathtub, because he knew about them. At night at four o’clock I thus managed to… I knew one family from the church, and at four o’clock in the morning I rang their door bell and I hid the things in their home. They were the Černý family, she was a doctor and her husband was an engineer and I hid the things in their home. It was even more complicated, because that very evening, Salesian Josef Šplíchal visited us as well and he served the Holy Mass in our flat. When they later rang at our door and they brought me a letter from Otta, telling me to give the documents to them, I did not want to open the door for them. I said, no, I will not open. They opened the door themselves. They gave me the letter and they were already in my flat. I knew that I was not to let them enter the room where Josef Šplíchal, the Salesian, had been, because he had his things for the Mass there. They would have arrested him as an illegal priest, because he did not have the official permission for serving as a priest. What I did, therefore, was that I said as if yes, they knew that it was under the bathtub, and no, no, no, it was not under the bathtub, I already went to hide it.”
“He thus led me to Tomášek. I spoke with him. He was kind of naïve, he thought that if he turned the radio on, they would not hear what we were talking about. He was thus playing his tiny radio there and I told him what they had written, and that he must have known for sure that there was no religious freedom in our country. He said: ‘You know, you are right, but we have the strategy.’ I asked him: ‘And is it supposed to be so?’ And he shook his head that it was indeed not. I thus asked him: ‘Why?’ He was greatly encouraged and later he even confirmed me in the chapel and Věra Turková was present there as my godmother. He said: ‘Come anytime, I will be very happy to see you.’ Then I came to him later as the spokesperson for Charter 77 and I asked him for his blessing. He was greatly touched by it, that I – a mother of three children – was giving myself to something so dangerous. And so he gave me his blessing. He said that he had he power to send me for missions. And he thus gave me a special blessing of laying hands and thus he equipped me to be as a missionary in the environment of the Charter as well as in all places where I was.”
Marie Rút Křížková was born on June 15, 1936 in Miličín in central Bohemia. She is a Czech literary historian, author and teacher. After signing Charter 77 she worked as its spokesperson since 1983. She devoted her entire life to collecting and publishing the works of poet Jiří Orten who became the love of her life. In 1968 she completed a distance study of Faculty of Arts at Charles University, but she received her doctoral degree only in 1991. During the period of the so-called normalization she was not allowed to teach and instead she worked as a forest worker and in a post office. She also experienced several house searches and interrogations by the State Security Police (StB) during that time. After 1989 she was able to return to her profession. Marie worked with the Theatre Miriam in Prague, with the Václav Havel Library and she also published several of her own books. She has three daughters. Marie Rút died on 4th December 2020.
