"The basic principle was not to arrange anything over the phone. Don't arrange anything in writing. Everything by word of mouth, because some people had monitored mail and monitored phones. Some knew and some didn't know. Which was quite a complication, because you always had to meet with somebody and arrange some next steps. And there was no other way to do it than through personal negotiation."
"Even the generation of sixty-eight was different from the generation of the fifties. Because those of the fifties were priests and religious who were religiously committed and active, and they were prevented from doing so. Whereas our generation went into it knowing that it was 'With the Soviet Union forever and never otherwise'. That simply our life will be a life of socialism from beginning to end, because we will never get rid of socialism or communism. Whereas those from the 1950s were mostly waiting for communism to end again so they could continue the life's work they had before they were arrested or thrown out of their positions."
"Gradually, radio and television started saying things that I knew, and a lot of people knew too, were not true. More and more, the media were saying things that were outright lies. And we weren't able to confront that and do anything about it. This then came down to Palach in 1969. He tried to wake up people up somehow, which he partially succeeded in doing. But the results and fruits of his attempt came much later."
Libor Ovečka was born on 27 September 1950 in Prague. His father Josef and mother Olga came from a Catholic background in Central Moravia in the foothills of the Jeseníky Mountains. His father was a secondary school professor of Greek and Latin. He had to leave school in the 1950s and when he returned he taught Russian and German. Libor Ovečka graduated from grammar school, then studied English and philosophy. In August 1968, he photographed Soviet tanks in the centre of Prague. From 1970 he studied theology in secret and in 1979 was ordained in Krakow. He worked in the environment of the Salesian community. With his friend and theology student Mireia Ryškova, he was followed by State Security. He appears in a signal file named Preacher by the agents. He continued his theological studies in secret in Erfurt, East Germany. In the early 1990s he received his doctorate from the University of Passau. He founded the Jabok Higher Vocational School for the study of social and spiritual work with youth. At the time of the recording in 2024, he was working at the rectory in Dolni Počernice, Prague.
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