Miroslav Klípa

"As I remember one time Pavel [Hradilek] gave me a broken punched card, half a punched card, which was what they used in those computing centers, those punches and those punched cards. And he said, 'Go to Hošťka, somewhere here near Úštěk, and find a priest there, some parish priest,' he didn't even give me a name, 'but if you show him the half, he'll show you the other half, and if the halves are there, then...' Just like from some gangster movie. So we got ourselves together, we had an old Wartburg - well, it wasn't old then, but a nine hundred, we had little Ondra in there, a baby in a pram, and we went to this Hošťka. We were looking for the parish priest, and there was nobody in the rectory. But there was a scaffolding in the church, and there was a guy covered in paint with overalls on top. So we said we were looking for the parish priest. Well, he said, 'Why?' or 'How?', and we sort of said we wanted to deal with him. We still didn't know if it was him, he didn't know what was going on... He came downstairs and I took out half of the punched card, he reached into the overalls, took out the other half... Neither he nor I knew our names, but the punched card just sorted it out like that. So he said, 'Come with me.' So we took him in the car, we drove into the woods, quite a long way, and as there are these hayracks, and he had a key to one of the hayracks, and he opened it, and well, there was the hay, and behind it there was a machine and bales of these papers. So we loaded it up and the task was to take it to Kladno to Standa Pavlik and unload it there."

"Well, the study of theology took off, in the evenings, and then there were week-long summer camps where there were various lectures. Well, and gradually we found that we didn't know much about it because nobody told us anything. Pavel Hradilek was the ideal person to work underground, because he devised exactly such systems that one knew the minimum, only what one needed to know, and not otherwise, because there was always the threat of interrogation. And by then we knew that we were already doing something secretly, that studying theology was a thing on the edge. Then the apartment masses started, that was a complete obstruction of the supervision of the churches, and then there was the multiplication of all kinds of printed materials. First of all for the study and secondly for other things, some Information about the Church and so on."