Prof. ThDr., DrSc. Petr Pokorný

"I was admitted to the Academic Gymnasium still during the war. It was not easy to pass then, the exams took two or three days. A German inspector came and was to test primarily our physical fitness; the P.E. made nearly half of the whole examination. In the morning there was the German language, and the remaining quarter was left for all the other subjects. It was quite paradoxical that the inspector himself was in a wheelchair. They even measured our skulls to see if we were Aryan enough."

Interviewer: "Once, you quoted a definition by Karl Barth that his assistant published after his death: 'Resurrection or the eternal life is "what is not lost".' Pokorny clarifies after a moment: "Literally, 'nothing will be lost'; and the assistant’s name was E. Busch (1965-1968)." The interviewer: "Do you agree with this definition?" Pokorny: "Eternity does not mean lasting forever in time. That would make life relative. This is what makes Buddhism so deep - understanding that this is no hope really. The naiveté of the modern people is that they want to secure this cheap eternity, find a secret recipe, resort to transmigration, which is actually a punishment for both Buddha and Plato, before man finally dwells in nirvana or atones for his sins. On the contrary, it is this confrontation with the Ultimate Reality which brings people together, it is when personal histories become intertwined. This is where the simple image of common dining as a vision of eternity comes from: inscription in the Book of Life, a face-to-face meeting. These are the metaphors that directly affirm human identity: face to face, inscription in the Book of Life ... after all, that's what is written in our IDs."

"I see the principal benefit of the Christian-Marxist dialogue in that, first, the entire Ateist Committee of the Party's Central Committee sided with the Church in the civil dispute on the rights of the churches (for which they were all expelled from the Party in 1969), and, second, in that it contributed to triggering the Prague Spring."

Prof. Souček (Biblical and New Testament Studies) wrote a letter to the Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, Visser't Hooft, about the situation in Czechoslovakia and the alternatives for future development. His interpretation (as paraphrased by Pokorny) was that democracy had not been maintained by constitutional means and could have been maintained only by a military coup. That way, however, it would have discredited itself finally. It lost its credit for the first time during Munich, when many people ceased to trust in democracy and workers turned away from the West. For the second time, it lost credit during the expulsion of Sudeten Germans. That was a brave statement from him at the time (and a very rare one, others included P. Pitr; J. L. Hromadka only questioned whether the expulsion was done in a humane way). If the “Yugoslav model” had been used, the democratic tradition would not have survived the third blow. That, however, was not a realistic scenario (as Yugoslavia had been founded before the Soviets invented the A-bomb). Therefore, the Christians must take the burden - of which Hromadka talked after the February 1948 - upon themselves. As for the economy, it does not have to mean a total disruption, offers Souček; economy runs on inertia and the post-war results were good, with Czechoslovakia making it among the top 10 richest countries in the world at that time. Therefore, he concluded, we had to suffer through it all."