Ing. Zdeněk Weitosch

"They originally brought a priest there, we saw that. And then they sent the priests away and there were nuns. They worked down there, there are VEBY, they are textile factories, so they worked in those textile factories, those nuns, and then they closed it all down and the convent became orphaned. It was empty, the fact is that it wasn't destroyed, that people stole it or destroyed it, no. And I'm surprised that nothing was actually lost. There was a big old library. I remember the history of that, when the State Security officers came, they were animals... The library was destroyed. They didn't destroy some of the volumes completely, they damaged a lot, they threw it from the second floor, they threw the books down on the floor, there was a kind of a quadrature, there were several departments in that monastery, they threw the books down there. But in the end, I think one of the State Security officers was a little bit more educated, so he stopped the destruction of the books, and they even closed the gate, so you couldn't get into the monastery. It was a fortress, so to speak. And then the arrival of the policemen, that was at night, we were asleep, and it was just about three-quarters of a year ago, and so we were studying quite late into the evening, or into the night you could say. Some of them were studying and they were probably trying to ambush us so we'd be asleep. And we still couldn't get to sleep, so they broke in, and you know how they show it in the movies, they kicked the door in, and now they broke in, and they were looking at us, from the cot that we were in, the kids in the beds, all freaked out, some of them crying, the little ones crying. They said 'get up in the morning', and in the morning they threw us out again, early, and then they put us in the antons and took us to Náchod."

"And then there was Broumov, it was interesting in that monastery. The Americans were democrats, and they still treated us like boys. I, when I came to Broumov, I was fifteen years old, and there were boys twelve to thirteen years old, that was in the year forty-six, from the year forty-six on. And I don't know if it was in the year forty-nine or in the year fifty, in the year forty-nine we were kicked out of that monastery, I think it was. It was quite dramatic when they took us away, they didn't want us to be in that Broumov, where people knew us and we were quite popular, that monastery had quite a good, not good, excellent reputation there, so the communists didn't want to outrage the people too much, so they came there with antons, put us in an anton and took us to Náchod, to the station, to a stop in front of Náchod, I don't remember what the name of the village was, and they dropped us off there and said: 'Well go.'"