Dr. Vojtěch Eliáš

"And right at the beginning of my studies, I think that maybe I had my first trouble right away in November, also because of my upbringing towards honesty. They had us sign a paper which read, or was pre-printed, that we were not members of any order and that we would not join any order. And now that I analyze it a little bit in retrospect, all the members of the Order were instructed by their superiors that when such a paper came, they should sign it in good conscience and hand it in. Well, I had no instructions. I know that I told the secretary, who was actually officially the faculty snooper, so I told the secretary that I would be happy to sign it, that I wasn't in any order, because I really wasn't in any order, but that I refused to sign any commitment for the future, that I didn't know what was going to happen. Well, I didn't sign it. As it turned out in retrospect, perhaps to my chagrin, I was the only one in the class who didn't sign. Everybody else signed it. So the secretary called me in, and when I tell you about it now, I have to tell you that I'm not really clear myself how that could have happened. He just called me in there and started threatening me and saying, he just shouted out that everybody had signed it, so don't let me make a scene, and I would almost say don't let me spoil his job. And I responded at the time, I remember that, that's not true, that everybody signed it. Which I was bullshitting, because I said he was lying to me, because again I sort of knew from some other... that they often lie. So I was like, 'He's definitely lying,' so I said, 'It's not true that they all signed it, you're lying to me here,' and he got kind of mad and pulled out the papers and said, 'Here you go, they're all here!' And he put the papers in my hand. Well, I took them and I threw them in front of him into the stove, burning there. And... it was an interesting moment, kind of... just suddenly the papers were all burnt. I know that he went completely silent, I think he - you could almost say dramatically: he fell asleep. Because suddenly he didn't have a single paper. Well, he actually fired me and told me to go home. So I left the seminary. We were otherwise strictly kept there. So I just got on the bus and went home. By the fact that Cardinal Tomášek was in Prague, so I actually, I think it was sometime in the evening, so immediately the next morning I just ran to him and told him that this had happened to me and that I had been kicked off the faculty. And what he always did was he'd put the radio on like this, and he'd put the radio on and he'd take the opportunity to tell me to get up and go back. And I said, 'What am I going to do?' And he said, 'Act like nothing.' And at the time he said, 'Because they didn't give you any official notice that they were firing you. They would eventually fire you for not going in. So I got up and I went back.' Well, I got up and I went back. Everybody looked to see that I was back, and I just did exactly as Mr. Cardinal [said], nothing at all, I just acted like nothing happened. Well, nothing happened. I mean, it's interesting, but just nothing happened. So, I got fired, but then suddenly I was back again."

"They came for me once - of course, I think these cops liked that sort of scene - so I think they pulled me right out of my final exams. Uniformed policemen came straight to the graduation, to the graduation exam, and took me to Bartolomějská street. So it was like a theatre, wasn't it. And I think right there they offered me cooperation. Then it happened three more times. But I was a little bit prepared for it. I mean, they don't say, 'Do you want to be a cop?' They always said, 'Would you like to come with us...? We can see that you're...' They're buttering you up: 'We can see that you're like intelligent, so would you like, we need someone intelligent, that we could meet sometime and you could tell us how you see it and so on. We'd like to hear your opinion.' So I've always said I'm not interested in meeting with them. And then they said, 'Well, you don't always have to come here to Bartolomějská street, we could meet in a café or a pub somewhere.' I said, 'I don't go to pubs.' So I was instructed, Father Reinsberg told me, that you just mustn't agree to anything. So, with all due respect and sort of politeness, I said that if they called me, of course I would obey them, but that I would not go anywhere alone. So I never met anybody at any conspiracy meeting, because I simply refused even to go there. So I was taken away three times, that is, once and then twice more summoned to Bartolomejska street. I always came there and that was the end of it. I mean, after a few hours. For example, I think it takes, like, six hours or eight hours."