Pavel Hlaváč

“The people who motivated me to become a pastor were the ‘New Orientationists’, especially Professor Komárková, so I was - I can say - I was the closest to them of the whole of my generation. I participated - with Kája Trusina, Honza Šimsa, with Bláža Šourek, Milan Balabán, with Honza Dus and Láďa Hejdánek, mainly with Láďa, of course, he wasn’t a theologian, but... so I participated in the very agitated discussions in Hromádka’s flat, because the New Orientation, those were Hromádka’s pupils, who upheld Hromádka’s critical form. So I differentiate between Hromádka’s pupils and Hromádka’s toadies. Hromádka’s pupils were the ones who lost their state permissions or were imprisoned, and the toadies, they worked on their career at the Christian Peace Conference, right?”

“That was a dramatic moment, I described it nicely in one interview - simply, a horde of blokes tore into the flat at half past four. We lived on the first floor of a detached house; my uncle, Mum’s brother, and her father, Grandpa Kukliš, a shoemaker, lived downstairs. We children were sleeping in the bedroom, we woke up, and there were terrible things going on. Mum was a stickler for keeping things neat, and everything was strewn about the floor, drawers emptied, they behaved like pigs. That was their kind of terror tactic. We stood on the bed, hugging each other around the neck and crying, Mum was crying as well, Dad stood by the window, a bloke next to him, cuffed... I didn’t understand it at all, I have a detailed description in one of my memories here. I was brought up in Sunday school, where there was this kind Brother Jirsa, and he had a flannelgraph [a board of fabric used to tell a story by placing pictures on top - trans.], and he always put such a nice Lord Jesus there, then Jesus’s heart, our hearts... So it was a trusting kind of faith, and now my father... I always knew I could rely on him, Mum was in tears, he was in cuffs, and the Lord God was nowhere to be seen. I was utterly confused, I didn’t know what was going on. I don’t even remember when those brutes left.”