Vladimír Šiler

"The regime targeted the faith as such rather than the churches. It aimed at religious orientation. Inspections at workplaces took place along two lines. First, “What is your attitude toward 1968, the Prague Spring, to the Russian occupation?” The second line: “How did you, comrade, deal with the religious question?” That was terrible. Really humiliating and depressing. The regime forced people to pour the bucket of shit on their heads. To humble themselves. They were humiliated. And they said, 'Yes, I was wrong. Yes, I went to church. But I don't go there anymore. 'Just like in Orwell's 1984 novel, they were satisfied because you had to be ashamed of yourself. That's what they wanted. We saw it in our immediate neighbourhood. As we entered the spiritual practice, we saw everywhere in our parishes how the poor believers and their families had to go through it. One had to lie. People lived schizophrenically. Double-tracked. They went to church secretly. Baptism was possible in the neighbouring village. Weddings took place, for example, in Slovakia. We lived divided in some front lines and camps. They were here and we were hiding. And then we had an illegal fight. Resistance. Or something like that."

"There has been a lot of talk about Erika Kadlecová's sociological research. Survey of religiosity of the North Moravian Region. She was a Marxist sociologist who did the research sometime in the 1960s. Surprisingly, it turned out that the North Moravian Region is very pious. More pious than it ought to be. Than expected. Although the atheistic propaganda of the 1950s was the most disputed there. Both ideological and atheistic. In addition, the region has undergone a major demographic restructuring. People came from all sides. From Slovakia. And they thought that these people would be uprooted from their roots and their traditions. Therefore, they are more easily influenced by the socialist way of life. And it did not work. Surprisingly, it was here that piety remained more than in other regions of the republic."

We did everything differently than our dads advised "We had a major generation rebellion. We defined ourselves against the establishment. As we called it. Against our dads; against the world of adults. To the sensible who reasonably advised us. Towards those old wise men. We were truly revolutionary youth. When I later read The Revolting Man, I saw myself in it. That was exactly it. That was the generational defiance. We just wanted to do it differently. Now I can see that it was actually the belated existentialism of the 1950s. Camus and Sartre already said it twenty years ago. Then it came to us in some decoction. But what young people experienced in the West, we experienced it authentically with a certain delay as well. We wanted to be authentic. We wanted to do things our way. We wanted to be different. And that's why we deliberately did everything differently than dads recommended and advised."