Cyril Pazderka

"So my dad and this friend of his went after him and they silenced him, and he finally left, completely destroyed, the agitator. They didn't forget that, so Dad was sentenced to three months for sedition, for a political offence. They let him... they let him... they let him go to jail. In 1956, we had a feast and on the Saturday before the feast there was work in the fields. Apricots were being picked, the harvest was on and so on. The feast was always this big celebration in which the whole village had participated, as well as the family - cakes were baked, food was prepared and so on. And on Saturday afternoon they came to arrest him. It was such a terrible thing for us, that our father was suddenly taken away from us, but also our breadwinner. Because the whole farm was his business - the cattle, the fields. I remember that my dad used to harvest with a scythe and we used to take the plants and bind it into sheaves and bring it in. [The one] who was in the centre of it all was taken away from us and put in jail. It was at that point that I realised how evil and insidious the regime was - the communist one."

"Because we were a big family and we all had good relations, he [Brother Joseph from London] couldn't come to us and we couldn't go to him. So we used to meet in Hungary, because their 'goulash socialism' was not so strict. Because he had Austrian citizenship, he could go to Hungary. And we, so "kind" they were, could go there too. So we used to meet in Budapest and then at the Balaton. Because all of us siblings had a lot of children, we sometimes laughed that it would have been better to hire a bus instead of going out in five or seven cars. There really were a lot of us. It was beautiful, not just a family reunion, but also a spiritual one. As a priest, he had contacts in the church around the wolrd, he was interested in politics and things like that. When he came from Austria to Hungary, he brought with him a huge backpack filled with books by foreign publishers - Tigrid's Svědectví from Paris, a Roman publisher of religious literature, and so on. This was then distributed among the people there. A funny thing happened to me. We went home afterwards, and of course we thought that we had to hide the books well so that nobody would find them. So we hid them in the car. And two years later we went back to Hungary. When we were unpacking the things we needed for camping - the tent, the sleeping bags - I found a book in one of the sleeping bags, so it went to Czechoslovakia, back again, and back again to Bohemia. It was almost funny."