Darja Kocábová

"It was a bit, I would say, influenced by Taizé. Because I felt the need to talk to these people in the way I drew it from psychotherapy - to talk openly about their direction and their search for some kind of fulfillment, meaning in life. But that wasn't so common in the church, there were such, I would say... different ways of working with youth. And I suddenly saw in Taizé: it goes like that too, it's not something that stifles faith, on the contrary. And Freda experienced it like that there, so we actually started to work with the youth in an extended way in the youth congregation in Mladá Boleslav. And that was really fantastic. It was very demanding... The young people started to come to us first once a year or half a year for the so-called 'Big Boleslav'. And already there it showed that some people would like to meet and work more intensively. That was also the time of normalisation already. So, before the Charter, when it all collapsed, so in the early seventies, although it was after the occupation - or during the occupation - we came to the conclusion that it would be good to meet some of these seekers, real seekers, more often and more intensively. So Freda and I came to the conclusion that we would make two groups. One would be sort of meditative, sort of more theologically oriented, too, and political. And the other one will be personal. And that we would then exchange the groups, so there was always one meditative, the Christian one, you could say, and the other personal. And then we switched again, and this happened every month for a whole weekend. I always came to Kosmonosy on Monday morning completely drained."

"I personally owe it to him that he absolutely accepted my type of Christianity. I felt that I was going down a path that was a little off the beaten path. Whereas he really, I say, respected and acknowledged that path of mine so much that I got a little bit of my self-confidence back. Although I had been searching hard since I met my husband. I even went to theology classes with him because I wanted to understand him and at the same time I felt an empty space inside me that wanted to be filled with that Christian path. I've been longing for that all my life, but I'm not able to sort of accept that kind of language or those ways of expressing myself in the church. Somehow I can't bring myself to say that publicly. I've been under a lot of, I guess, pressure, too. At one time, Freda pressed me a lot. It was also his transition from Catholicism to Christianity, and somehow he felt it very intensely. And it wasn't that he was impatient, but he wanted to help me somehow, and he pushed me a little too hard. And I just resisted a little bit. Because I can't do this. I just have to do what I really feel internally."

"That's mostly what I did with Jana, the sociotherapy club. Plus often fellow junior doctors would join us. I told myself, these people need to get to know a little bit of other personalities too. So I regularly invited even dissidents there. So Ivan Klíma came there, Helena Klímová, Chytilová - Chytilová even wanted to make a film, but they forbade her to do that, of course. She wanted to make a documentary film, and Krátký film just forbade her categorically. Then there were also people from the religious field, of course my husband, he often came with me. He went abroad sometimes, but he also went with us on those rehabilitation stays. I thought that they had the opportunity to talk to a clergyman. The parish priest Kejř was there, or the musicians were there: Vladimír Merta, of course our Michael. Our Michael often came with me to the club. Karásek was there too. So I invited there, I would say... today somebody would say 'café society' - yes, somebody, we know who. So I was inviting people who were really thinking and who were looking for a way for our society." - "How did that communication go, say, between the 'mentally ill' and the 'normal people'?"-"Well, perfectly. Everyone was excited about the dissidents or the visitors, how open these people were, interested, asking questions. And I thought it was really appreciated when that one patient of mine, the most loyal one, a certain Přáda Jiří, an engineer Jiří Přáda, who is still in contact with me to this day - so I thought highly of his assessment. First of all, he said that actually I was equally open to all patients, one thing. And the second thing, the important thing, was that I was educating for democracy outside of psychotherapy. Which I didn't even realize, but they appreciated it that way. So even they were well oriented politically when the year eighty-nine came."

"Daddy was, I would say, a bit of a tragic figure from my point of view. It may be too strong a word, but he played the wrong card in his life. Because he did end up with the Communists, and I think that killed him too. Because the end of his life was really almost symbolic. Because the first blow that came to this idea of his that this was an ideology of justice and the future and highly humane - so the first blow came in 1956. I think it was the Communist Party Congress in the Soviet Union where the crimes of Stalin were exposed. So that was the first blow he got - indeed, he studied it, he had the document on his bedside table. And we weren't allowed to touch it! Not even touch it. He didn't want us to get our hands on it at all. Then the next blow came, that was 1968. That was the end. So he already tore apart the membership card. And I actually see the symbol in that he finally had a heart attack in '68. He had a heart attack, and they took him to the General Hospital, and the patients there said that when they heard about the burning of Jan Palach, he had a second heart attack. And that was just the final one. And they had a funeral together on the same day."