Josef Chroust

"My father-in-law Josef Batelka, he was a man who... Evangelical pastor. He went to study architecture, and when the universities were closed on November 17, 1939, he was among those students who were arrested and taken to Sachsenhausen! He survived, after 16 months they sent him home. They, the Germans - I asked my father-in-law or my grandfather about this, and he said, 'Josef, sometimes the Germans wanted to show that they were a little bit better than they were thought of.' And imagine, he was just under 187 centimetres tall, his weight was accordingly. And when he came home, he weighed forty-five kilos, his mother didn't even recognize him. So I told the director that he had survived the war and hadn't gone back to architecture. He was very gifted as a draftsman, and among other things, if you ever heard of the Old Testament, there are one hundred and fifty psalms - and he retold fifty psalms so they could be sung. If you buy an evangelical hymnal, there's Josef Batelka. So he was no fool, he graduated from the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Theology at the same time. He had two university degrees."

"This is how he handed me the letter that was written to me. I read it. And it said that Josef Chroust, an engineer, had joined Českomoravský len (Czech-Moravian Linen Company) on 2 January 1988, that he was a mechanic, head of the repair shop, that he didn't understand anything at all, that he didn't know how to deal with people, and that he had a strong folk mentality. Or that there was a strong popular feeling in the linen workshop and they were convinced that he would support the people in this. And then it was written that his wife is the daughter of a parish priest from Nové Město and his whole family is flawed by that. And they gave that to him and Peñáz let me read it and I told him that I hadn't kept anything from him about my background and my wife. And suddenly he started roaring like a bull, I can´t even show you how, and pounding his chest that nobody would interfere into his cadre politics. And he helped me out of it."