“I remember that I was on the bus at that time, I was going to an illegal event, to a meeting in the area of Haná, I was on the bus and I suddenly heard on the radio that there had been student demonstrations on 17 November in Prague, it was expected that the demonstration was going to take place in Albertov, it was not illegal. And then they talked about the course of the demonstration and that a student had been shot. And I froze and said to myself: ‘We can´t do that anymore. It is not possible anymore. It's over. We can't do it here anymore.‘ I arrived in that place, I do not remember it exactly, I came back and someone had already contacted me by that time that we were going to meet on Monday at Peace Square because a demonstration was going to take place there and if I dared to participate. I said: ‘No, we can´t let them kill people.‘”
“On 21 August I was in Ostrava visiting my uncle as I was helping my aunt to take care of her older daughter, I was babysitting her three-year-old because my aunt had just given birth to her second baby girl. And my uncle used to go to work early in the morning, I think around six o´clock and when I woke up in the morning I went to see my aunt in the kitchen who was crying and she said: ‘Anička, I´m really frightened that it's going to be a war.‘ And I did not know what was going on and she told me: ‘We have been occupied by the Russians.‘ I remembered my dad and told her: ‘But aunt, it is not possible because they had liberated us. How could they occupy us?‘ Even then as a thirteen-year-old girl it seemed unrealistic to me because they had liberated us. When we played soldiers with the kids, we were always Russians and Germans. We were never for example communists or anti-communists. And then I heard in Ostrava, or maybe I just think that I heard planes. The children were crying so we fed them and then my aunt cried because the TV was on and I cried as well. There were two women there, a new mother and a girl who did not understand anything. And we were crying that they were going to invade us and there was going to be a war.”
“When I started my third year, we had a teacher who is probably still alive as I saw her some time ago. She was a zealous communist. She might not have believed it, I don´t know, but we were two children in our class who were enrolled in religion. Nobody else attended religion and I know that my teacher back then found any opportunity for me to help her in her office on Friday when the religion was taking place: ‘Anička, help me with this and do that.‘ And I was an enthusiastic little girl: ‘Mrs. Teacher, I can come to your office, well that is wonderful!‘ when you have the opportunity to come to the teacher´s office as a child. However, after about a month my mum asked me what we had studied in religion and I said: ‘Well actually, I wasn´t there because I was helping my teacher with some things.‘ And she said: ‘Show me your notebook (to see) what you did at other lessons.‘ And there was nothing in the notebook. I had not attended the religion once. Consequently, my mum went to see the teacher and told her that she wanted me to attend religion and that she did not mind me helping her but any other time than when I had this subject. Well, that's when the terror kind of started.”
Anna Švehláková was born on 25 July 1955 in Gottwaldov (today´s Zlín). Even though her father František Švehlák was a member of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, the family was very religious. As a child, Anna experienced bullying from children and some teachers at school because of her faith. In 1968 when she was thirteen years old, she experienced the Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Ostrava where the invaders crossing the Miloš Sýkora Bridge were pointing machine guns into the demonstrating crowd. Her father left the Communist party based on those events. Anna was admitted to a grammar school in 1970 in her hometown and she successfully graduated there four years later. She could only start studying Medicine thanks to a lie in her reference as her class teacher wrote there that she had coped with the religious question. Anna got to know the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and started to attend illegal religious events organized by Zlín Salesians and Dominicans. She took part in lay seminars during which the theologian Josef Zvěřina gave lectures. She attended the National Pilgrimage at Velehrad in 1985, where the then Minister of Culture Milan Klusák was booed. After graduation from Medicine in 1980, she worked for three years in the children‘s ward at the Gottwaldov Hospital, after which she was transferred to Brumov by order of the regime. She returned to Gottwaldov in 1989 when she decided to get board-certified in paediatric neurology, a field she would continue to pursue until 2022 although at retirement age. After the Velvet Revolution, Anna Švehláková became friends with important underground characters - Pavel Zajíček, Ivan M. Jirous and Jaroslav Erik Frič. She also participated in the management of Frič‘s publishing house Vetus Via for some time. She was living in Zlín in 2022.
