"Well, with them, I decided I would try to make the whole Oasis a fifteen-day one. We went near Dobrý at Dobruška. We found a lonely building near Dobruška, and we spent fifteen days there, and actually, we did the whole Oasis, the whole fifteen days. And that was the first time we tried to go out in pairs to meet people, to do our first expedition. It was a very intriguing experience for me, but there was a very improtant takeaway from it. I found out with surprise that people are not hostile to faith. That was such a big surprise, and finding out that people are really not hostile to faith at all. We were used to this aggressive atheism from lectures, how it's outdated and everything, and actually the church was silent, and here these atheists dominated the scene, we can say, and the surprise was that this didn't come among people at all."
"My colleagues never actually knew that I was a priest and that I was a Dominican. They knew that I was an active Catholic and that I did not hide my faith. I had these pictures under the glass that when I got approved for a chemistry postgraduate, my colleagues would laugh and say, 'The cadre guy who signed off on that should have gone and looked at your desk,' and they would laugh. And I've always tried to somehow live up to that so I could walk in front of those people the next day in my robes in peace. I think the first such surprise was when I was already in nuclear medicine, so actually during those chaotic days, when I think St. Agnes was in Prague, our group went not to Letná but went down from the Castle, from the Cathedral, across Charles Bridge, to our monastery to St. Giles. So I met my colleagues from the Institute of Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Technology, and I had this banner, 'Freedom for religious orders'. We were carrying a banner and something else. And I went dressed in a robe. Well, this photo exists, and even journalists took it, of us walking as a group of Dominicans carrying two banners in front. And I was carrying one of them with somebody else, and I think it just said, 'Freedom for religious orders'. We're there walking like four of us, carrying two banners and the others behind us, walking as a group. Well, that's how I ran into my colleagues. Then my boss in chemistry, who I worked under, who was really trying to get me to do something at work, he said, 'Well, if I knew you were subverting the republic, I wouldn't have chased you so much.'"
"And Father Jiljí, who was doing something in the quadrangle of the monastery of St. Giles, cleaning the canals, suddenly said to me while we were working: 'Did something happen in Pilsen? There was an announced visitor, and nobody opened the door for them.' On Saturday - it was Monday. Well, I went back to Inorga, it was actually an organization, a research institute for economics, and it was under heavy engineering. We had direct dialing at the so-called VHJ, at Škoda Plzeň I could dial 5114, and immediately I was connected to the switchboard of Škoda Plzeň - and there on another line was Vojtěch Rakovský, who was with Dominik. So I picked up the phone and called Vojtěch Rakovský from work. And Vojtěch Rakovský picked up. 'Hello,' I said, and Vojtěch Rakovský said, 'Don't you know?' So I gasped, and I remember that during that conversation, we agreed that we would meet, that I would go to Plzeň and that we would meet in the suburbs of Plzeň at Doubravka on Rokycanská Street. To this day, there is a bus stop there. Today there's a Baumax there, that's on one side, and on the other side, there's an opposite stop from Prague's direction. So we agreed to meet there. I went to Florenc right after work, got on the bus, and in about two hours, I was in Pilsen. I got off the bus, and Vojtěch was waiting for me - and Vojtěch described what had happened. On Friday evening, the State Security guys had broken into Dominik's house. They had searched the house, and they had turned it upside down. Vojtěch said they had about 1,200 items that they confiscated from Dominik, and they had half a truckload of them. Some secretly printed literature and stuff. As they were going through all this, Tomáš Bahounek came running in because they were supposed to be studying. He rang the bell, and one of the State Security men went to open the door for him. Tomáš perhaps just greeted him and ran into the kitchen. There it was a mess. The State Security men rushed at him, took his picture immediately, and told him he was under arrest, and his bag and his chin dropped, and he understood that he had walked into a trap. Well, they took them there a long time, and then they ended up in Bory."
"And the three of us decided to go to the funeral. We went to the cemetery at Markéta and eventually to the church there. It was quite drastic. I remember all the traffic was diverted from Břevnov. There was no other way to get there than to drive somewhere... I don't remember exactly if perhaps we didn't go all the way from Strahov to Břevnov. So when we were approaching the cemetery, we were walking up the road that goes past the motor racing track on Markéta. And as we approached the entrance to the cemetery, I suddenly noticed that there were stands and cameras on them, and they were recording just openly. That was the first time I saw them recording everybody going in there. Then there were many photographers in the cemetery, photographers everywhere from behind different trees, motorbikes cranked up, so you couldn't hear a word, from Markéta, from that flat track, and there was also a helicopter flying over it. The general impression was very traumatic, I would say. I admit that afterward, I still had trouble seeing the camera lens for a long time. As a stranger, if someone took pictures somewhere, I would subconsciously put my hand in front of my face and stuff like that. Then we went to the church at Markéta, where I also took communion. There were a lot of people there. Well, the local parish priest was serving the funeral mass then, and he was crying a bit. I guess he was pretty nervous too. The acolytes, God knows who they were. Then we went back home, so that was Patočka's funeral."
Jan Rajlich was born on 4 November 1954 in Tábor as the fourth child of Václav and Marie Rajlich. After graduating from grammar school in Milevsko, he studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague. His encounters with charismatic priestly personalities, Stanislav Krátký, who encouraged him on his way to priesthood, and with the Dominican Metoděj Habáň, from whose hands he received the monastic robe in 1977, were of great importance to his future life. After finishing his university studies and military service, he worked in scientific institutions INORGA, ÚTZCHT ČAV (Institute of Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Technology of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences - trans.) and the Institute of Nuclear Medicine and Biophysics of the 1st Faculty of Medicine of Charles University. Since joining the Dominican Order, he has been involved in the realization of residential seminars and philosophy courses. After his secret ordination in 1983, he concentrated mainly on the pastoral care of university students and the introduction of the Catholic Light of Life movement into the Czech environment. After the Velvet Revolution, he taught philosophy and sociology at Charles University in Prague and Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem and worked at Dominican convents in Bohemia and Moravia. Between 2021 and 2023, he made three missionary trips to the African continent.
