Monika Le Fay, roz. Elšíková

“I remember that he [father - Ed.] would go to work and come home in the evening and he would listen to Radio Free Europe during my whole childhood. It was on the whole day, from morning, till evening. And he felt that his life had been completely ruined. I think that his choice turned against him. We were raised in anti-communist spirit. Relatives sent us parcels from Australia and greetings from Brazil. We knew that there was better world. But we could not go there.”

“Samizdat books spread a lot in Zlín. We collected different things, made them, printed and came up with them. For example, we launched a petition for Standa Devátý, who was prosecuted and was at risk of dying. So, I went to see my friend Radka Chovancová and we came up with a petition and we put A Few Sentences on the other side of the page. We managed to get maybe several dozens of young people who guaranteed and said that they wanted to be imprisoned instead of Standa. That they did not want to live in a country that broke human rights. And the State Security officers were really furious at it. They knew that there were some dissidents and grey area [in Gottwaldov - Ed.]. However, it was really clever from us - to find people who were neither dissidents nor in Samizdat. It looked as if the resistance was spreading.”

“You can´t imagine that it was difficult to get paper at that time. For example, I remember that people took it in a printing company. And then you went by trolleybus with a ream of paper and so everyone knew what you were going to do. It was not like today. Why do you need paper? And why do you need so much paper? I knew where a cyclostyle was. And the policemen really wanted me to tell it. They threatened me that they would kill me and that they would put me with prostitutes. I do not even want to remember it now. The whole thing was horrible. And everything happened just because they wanted to know where the cyclostyle was. I naturally did not say anything. A conspiracy of many people was necessary. There was a lot of delicate work with it. For example, stacking. It means that when you have a lot of sheets, you have to stack them into files and then you walk around and stack the files. It is really difficult and annoying. And someone has to copy it as well. There was a lot of hard work behind the things...”

“I wrote a book about it, so I do not want to narrate it now in two sentences. I can only say that I did not want to meet him, I was not interested in him. And it ended the way that I am the only person who is baptised after him - I am Monika Anastázie - and he died in my arms. His last sentence was: ‘I told the monks that you were Monika Anastázie.’ Our lives were so somehow interconnected even though I did not want to be baptised. [...] For me, he is a man who can put up with everything and it does not ruin him. Mainly because he is not negative and mean to other people and on the contrary, it makes him stronger. And maybe I could finish with a sentence of Ivan Martin Jirous who was a well know agitator and who, after Anastáz Opasek returned after an eleven-year sentence where he had been in solitary confinement for two years and had almost lost his mind, told him: ‘You Catholics were really crying out for the imprisonment.’ And the abbot not only did not feel insulted, but he nodded his head and said: ‘You know, you are right.’ And Jirous was not able to say anything and admired him since then and he wrote a beautiful poem about him.”