"I am Dr. Jiřina Křížková, born on 21 August 1925 in Plzeň. Our family was Catholic. We always respected Sunday, it was a holiday. Both grandmas lived with us when I was a child. One married a widower with ten children and had two more children, the other had seven children. Both grandmas lived with us for ten years. We were three children. Both grandmas died after ten years, consecutively, as they came, and then a young brother was born, so we were four children. Dad supported seven people, and it was not easy."
"We did the samizdat publications. I had three typewriters, and whoever I could find would type and copy stuff for me. I literally have a bag - it's eight kilos - of all kinds of samizdat literature. I will show you later. So we typed and gave it to whomever we could. Someone asked me: 'Who did you give the Vatican documents to?' And I really don't know. I think I gave them to Father Stanislav. He learned somehow that I had them, and wrote to me. And that's how we distributed it, any way we could."
"Now StB, that meant a lot of 'beautiful things'. They would come for me to my apartment or to work, and once they came to a congress. They came to Dobřany and were told that I was at a child psychiatry congress. I can't tell you what town it was. It was in a former monastery north of Prague. They came in the morning and we were in the forest at the time. They saw I was not there, but I came back after a while, so they took me to the StB office. They talked to me for a long time, having come for me from Prague, but they could not make me speak. Another time, they took ten of us, put everyone in a different room, and then related to one another what each of us said. Of course we could tell who said what. One woman, Jana Peroutková, figured she would tell them all, as we were not doing anything subversive, so why not tell them. But they took religious matters as subversive, in their viewpoint, it was highly anti-state."
Jiřina Křížková was born in Plzeň on 21 August 1925 into a Roman Catholic family; her parents raised four children. Having graduated from the Girl‘s High School in Plzeň, she studied medicine. During her studies in Prague after the war, when she was a member of the School Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis congregation, she was in contact with the circles around Jan Evangelista Urban (Studium Catholicum) where she met prominent members of the Roman Catholic Church (O. Mádr, J. Zvěřina) with whom she later worked in distributing samizdat texts. Having completed her medical studies and postponed graduation, she worked her way up the ranks to become the head of the paediatric department of the Dobřany sanitarium, despite her impaired „cadre profile“ due to being a religious person. Her profound and genuine faith led her to many samizdat activities. Among other things, she was one of the first people to bring and distribute the texts from the 2nd Vatican Council in Czechoslovakia. Her tireless effort towards the right to freely pursue her faith in the communist Czechoslovakia caused her to be the only woman elected to the Archdiocese Pastoral Council in 1968. She was monitored and prosecuted by StB for year, including as part of the PROLEXA project. She visited Archbishop J. Beran in internment, had a major share in the Council Renewal Scheme movement, helped many clerics in and around Plzeň who remained faithful and resisted becoming average citizens, initiated Christian medical meetings, organised adoptions, took part in the inception of ecumenic biblical families and the Christian Academy in Plzeň etc. Her life followed the motto: „Life is God‘s gift and death is God‘s love.“
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
