Vojtěch Šíma

"The company commander's name was Ivan. And in '68, when the Russians came, he was like, 'Not anymore, starting today' - he was Slovak - 'I'm not Ivan anymore, from today I'm Martin. And now write...' The order was signed by Martin, he put the surname there. I thought: Well, it's nice that he doesn't agree with it. Now: in the sixty-eighth we were getting such nonsense orders, like we mustn't get disarmed if the Warsaw [Pact] troops came, we mustn't get disarmed. But we must not resist. I know we built a tank - we were tank troops - so we put a tank in the gate so the Russians couldn't get in. Those officers didn't know for the first week, they didn't know whose they were. Maybe not even a week later the company commander came in, so angry, from the headquarters and said to me, 'Write Ivan. Don't write Martin anymore.' I said: Oh, they've already been instructed. They already know whose they are."

"I found out in the army that those officers, they're a bunch. That they are unprincipled people. You could tell there that they were mostly ochmelki. Always on the booze. And I had a report that said, I think it came from the commune, 'He's a religious khanatic.' That's what it said, in red. 'He's a religious khanatic and he disagrees with the regime.' I was a senior, so I got hold of the materials, so I read it. I thought, 'I'm a khanatik?' But I was a sergeant major, if you were in the army, that was a position for an officer or a professional soldier. So I was doing that. So I had a fairly good army in that I was in charge of rations and material support. And I also had time for myself there in that I had my quarters where I could hole up. But I'll tell you, it's interesting: we didn't have to go to church... or we were told not to go to church. I went to church. I was in Budejovice in the army. And there you went to the monastery church, it was in the other corner of the square, as the tower is, and the monastery was in the other corner. And I always went there. So I would kneel down behind one of the columns there and pray there. And one soldier came there, another one. And now he saw that there was a soldier behind the pillar, he said, 'That's a cop, he's guarding it.' And he went to pray behind the other pillar. And that was Vojta Cikrle, the later bishop of Brno. So we were there, we didn't even know each other. Then, when I was in the seminary, he said to me: 'You, weren't you in Budejovice in the army?' I said: 'Well.' - 'Didn't you go?' - 'I did.' - 'So I was afraid of you...' So that's a bit paradoxical, isn't it? I guess we were all praying for the same thing behind different pillars. So we're on very good terms, he's already emeritus, isn't he, the Bishop of Brno."