František Kohlíček

"There were strict rules aswell. So when there's too much leeway, I think it isn't very healthy, that a person really does need some form of discipline, self-discipline, to manage well when rought times come, so that he isn't pointlessly discouraged and so on."

"And from Mírov I was taken to Jáchymov, to the uranium mines, as you know. So I was there, but only for a short time, some three months all in all. It was a strange camp, ell it was called, where there was a large group of priests. And that's where all the mines, from the Jáchymov or Příbram districts or even from East Bohemia, all the mines sent the uranium ore there to be ground and crushed into little bits, which they put into these barrels. And so I was there standing at one of those mills, where they ground the hardest ore, right. That was all handled by hand, all of it, so whoever was there for a longer time ended up with health problems, because that ore wasn't really very healthy."

"Then they made these three big groups out of it all. I was in the third group, with Father Ferda and a class mate from grammar school that actually belonged to his parish, he was from the Sedlčany district. We were just the third group, so there were about ten of us. They imprisoned us all. And one other thing that I did: they fond out that I had been taking letters to one of the imprisoned priests, that I read out pastoral letters, and as a extra note they claimed I had had a bad influence on the theology students and stuff like that. So then there was the trial, 27th, 28th and 29th of September, in Ostrava it was, but the state trial, or whatever they called it, the state trial was in Brno, that was in the Fifties."

"We [priests] have a vow of celibacy, so we don't have a family, and it was a lot easier for us than for those, who did have a family, a wife and so on. Those people were in anguish, those prisoners, they suffered spiritually much more than us, who didn't have that. There were priests dispersed to various places with the other 'civilians', so then they saw that the priests were serving amongst them. When [the other prisoners] saw that the priests could bear the prison much easier than the married people, then they became interested in the faith and some of them were even baptised and really started to live a religious life, masses were served in secret... When [the jailors] found out about this, they made a seperate section for priests, so that we didn't mingle with the 'civilians'... We also knew what we were suffering for. It was the persecution of the Church, and so we endured it much more easily than the people who didn't have that understanding. Faith gives people the strength and endurance to overcome the difficulties. Even the hunger, the harsh treatment and disciplinary action. It was much easier for us."

"By then it was obvious, as they had known each other from before, the descriptions of what it looks like in Russia, right. So it was generally known, what the situation was. There was some apprehension here. I became the vicerector of the seminary in 1946, also the rector of the seminary had been made archibishop of Prague not long before. There were three candidates at the time, the Vatican gave the government a list of three candidates to choose from. Well, those were Jarolímek, the Strahov abbot, Urban, a Fransiscan, and Beran, the rector. Because Beran had been in a concentration camp, in Dachau, and there were several Communists there also, naturally, well then they decided to vote in Beran, because they were in the government, so that several of their ministers were from Dachau, so they had this kind of friendship, so they reckoned: 'He'll be our boy, that Beran.' They were disappointed, naturally."