Mgr. Pavel Klinecký

“Then came the August. We were at our cottage and I used to go shopping. This was my domain since I was seven. And it was there that I learned about it. We had a radio in our cottage but it was broken, it almost didn’t play. Only time to time you could squeeze something out of it. I came to the dairy shop and they said there were tanks in Prague, that there was shooting, the Russians came. I didn’t understand it much. It was a kind of sensation for me. I came home and said, ‘Look, there is shooting in Prague, the Russians came.’ I remember my parents how they went green. They were in shock. And now they said, ‘Couldn’t we do something about the radio so that we hear it?’ I was already playing with soldering iron and vacuum valves so I opened it from the back and tried to put it in order. Then I managed to catch a tiny voice, saying ‘Ignore the occupiers’ — this is what I remember.”

“And so I happened to walk into the piety. And the child, the boy… perceived this in a very intensive manner, with emotions. I saw young people standing around the statue. The statue of St Wenceslas was covered with posters. I still remember, ‘What to say to the time when the light of future is brought by a burning body.’ I was fourteen then and it really touched me. And by the sides of Wenceslas there were the guards with the flag. Always a boy or a girl. Another one approached, stood in front of the guard and the guard gave him the flag. The other then took his place. It was arranged somehow. It was a group of people who took part about it. I think mostly they were university students, people between twenty and twenty six. The fourteen-year-old boy was so daring that he got in — it was roped off. I stuck around as if I belonged there. Then I stood opposite one of the guards with the flag, he gave me the flag and I took his place and stood there, holding the flag. I managed to stay there for a while. Perhaps someone noticed that what a child there was. But say for five six minutes I stood there. And I had a feeling my hand was on the very pulse of history. A fourteen-year-old boy standing with the flag at the piety for Jan Palach.”

“When then professor Jan Patočka died — indeed, as has been proved, due to a many-hour-long interrogation, an elderly man with a heart disease — he had a funeral. The funeral became a silent protest. We, everybody who could, simply had to be there. I was there too. We saw that nearby, at the Marketa stadium, they called some two racers or maintenance personnel for bikes who stood just by the fence and for the whole duration of the funeral they cranked up their machine for the loudest sound. There was no reason, naturally. So in this way they disturbed the funeral. I even can’t remember who the priest was. Some catholic priest, probably. It was an earth funeral. Many people. We saw Mrs Kubišová, Mr Hutka, and many other people. There were two cameras at the entrance. Quite overtly. Some people walked past the cameras and hid their faces by their coats. I think I even didn’t try to hide. I thought I could go to a funeral, I could justify this.”

“You wrote a sermon. You knew what you wanted to say. And somewhere in the background there was something like a spam filter, the one you have in your computer, a filter that preventive sensitive issues from entering your sermon — that is topics related to politics that could be perceived as a criticism of the regime. You looked at your own sermon through the eyes of the censor. That he could see this… As soon as you touched upon anything topical, you had to take great care. I remember the explosion at the chemical factory in India, Bhopal, and I put it into my sermon. And I had creeps what an authentic person I was, despite the fact that it had absolutely nothing in common with the Communist policy of the 1980s. But I touched the current time. We were allowed to touch present in personal matters, such as internal feelings etc., but not in what happened in public. You have this in the back of your mind and are careful.”

“I went to the head teacher of the vocational training and I told him: ‘You wrote such a reference letter for me that I would not have gotten accepted anywhere with it and I want to ask you why you did it? Look, I want to study theology, I want to become a pastor. I know this job quite well and I think that as a pastor I can do a lot of good things for the people, but you are now actually forcing me to become a bad car repairman, because I don’t like this job and as you can see, I am not particularly good at it, either.”

“I remember that I got into big trouble some time in 1966, because I kept a photo of Masaryk in my wallet and they wanted to confiscate it from me. ‘Give it to me, what is it that you got in that wallet?!’ I replied: ‘I won’t give it to you.’ That was a scandal, and so I got expelled from school when I was in the seventh grade and I was transferred to the school in Omská Street.”

“He came to me and told me that his wedding was planned for tomorrow, but that his pastor had not received the authorization for ministry and he now had nobody who would conduct the wedding ceremony. I told him: ‘If I did it for you without the state authorization, that would be the end of me. You are well-known, Vladimír Mlynář, the son of Mr. Mlynář from 1968, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, no way. But what we will do is that I will prepare the whole wedding with you, and tomorrow in the morning I will go to inform upon myself in the Department for the Issues of the Church (which was the superior authority for church in the city administration office), and if they give me the permission, then I will conduct the wedding ceremony. I really went there the following day and they were already waiting for me. They had received a notice from the StB that Vladimír Mlynář’s wedding was to be held that day in the Church of St. Martin in the Wall at 11 o’clock. They did not know who would conduct the wedding, but whoever it would be, the wedding would be illegal. They knew that the Radio Free Europe would be there, and the Voice of America, too, and foreign intelligence services…and I, Pavel Klinecký, then came to them and said: ‘Good morning, Mrs. secretary, I would like to ask you…’ ‘So that’s you!’ They were already waiting for a pastor who got talked into it… ‘Well, I cannot decide that myself, we need to go to see the director.’ We thus went directly to the director of the Department for the Issues of the Church and they knew me and they knew that I was an honest man and that I tried to be fair and that I had never played any tricks with them, and they eventually granted me the permission. On top of that, the director told me: ‘Do you realize, pastor, that there will be foreign intelligence services there as well?’ I even took the liberty to be so impertinent that I replied: ‘Director, not only the foreign ones.’”