“At times when the events escalated, there were more cases of people being taken to State Security interrogations. Those priests from Bohemia as well as Silvester Krčméry began to train us. They tried to prepare us for interrogations, but I don´t exactly remember, in what period it was happening.”
“I also have other interesting stories to tell that happened after those raids. When we met in Blumentál church with other sisters from our community or from other orders, it was already after the worst inspections and interrogations. I invited them to my mom´s place to chat a little. I know my mom already knew what was going on, but we wanted to tell her more about what had happened. We wanted to let her know about my brother and so on. She offered us traditional halušky (gnocchi) that she´d just cooked. These sisters somehow couldn´t eat anything, and so I asked them: ‘What´s wrong? Why don´t you eat?’ They answered: ‘Well, we are sated with those papers up to here…’ Because, when they were at the interrogation, they were sitting in a room with one sister, who carried all kinds of stuff in her purse. Since they knew what would follow, they tried to tear and throw out of the window everything possible and what wasn´t possible, they ate.”
“Well, I don´t think they literally had something the worst, but I can hardly express certain things instead of them. I just remember my brother saying, they were imprisoned opposite to men sentenced to death or something alike. I can´t recall exactly, but he was put to heavy criminals.”
“We had never thought of any informers in our order. There was just one interesting comment an officer said during the house search to me: ‘You pay attention and watch out who you take side with.’ So they themselves dropped a hint something like that existed.”
Terézia Šmídová was born on January 27, 1954 in Bratislava. She comes from a Christian family. After graduating from the Secondary School of Economics in Bratislava she joined the secret Bratislava branch of religious order of St. Francis of Assisi. She witnessed a State Security intervention within the „Operation Whirl“ (Akcia Vír) on March 27, 1983, during which was her brother Anton Šmíd arrested along with other religious people. She had to go through interrogations at the State Security Headquarters. After the Velvet Revolution, Terézia assisted with reestablishing the Franciscan community in Žilina. Recently she works within the charity house in Okoličné.
