Mgr. Jan Choděra

"I even got that time to Bartholomějská Street. In Wenceslas Square again, the cops had it all well prepared. I was walking, I had been at my dad's, I was walking from his place, it was evening, it was already dark. And I was walking up Wenceslas Square and I met a friend. There was already a gathering of people there, so we were watching, we were participating, and we were saying, 'Hey, there are buses full of policemen, we have to watch our for them as soon as they get off the buses.‘ And they did get off the buses, but by that time there had been other policemen, so they locked us in, put us all in police vans and took us to Bartolomějská Street, so I was there until seven in the morning. I was lucky again that the investigator... there were two of them, classically a good one and a bad one, and the bad one... I didn't like him very much, we started talking there. Well, we started talking with the one who was interrogating me, the good guy. He said, 'You were there to...', and that I was obstructing traffic. I said, 'I was on the pavement all the time. I wasn't obstructing at all.' So we were talking about these stupid things, which annoyed the other guy, and he just stood up and left. And I was sitting there, he was talking to me about something, and it was really getting to be about seven in the morning, I had been there with him for maybe two hours, and he said, 'You know, I'm tired of this. You are not calling me names, and I don't want [to interrogate] anybody else, I'm going to finish soon, so don't be mad at me for keeping you here so long.' Lucky me! If there had been a kind of moron there... I saw boys who had been beaten with a baton. I saw a girl who had been beaten with a baton. We were standing there in the corridor all lined up, hundreds of us. And I was lucky enough to bump into a guy who was fed up with it."

"There was a denunciation. And, as I said, my father was very sociable, so there used to be meetings at the parish house, a pharmacist, and Mr., I don't know who... I know one of them was a pharmacist, but I don't remember the other professions, although I know a number of the names or I know there were stories about them. And what happened was that my dad, or rather our family, my mum and dad, bought a cooking robot. It's funny today, but back then in Jeseník it was like when television started, the whole house would go over to the neighbours' flat to watch TV. So they came to see it [the robot], and one woman who was there too, described it, I don't know why, as a meeting of a conspiratorial resistance group that wanted to overthrow the communist regime, and things like that... So, I think that some State Security officer needed to do an activity there. There had been actions against the clergy, so they went ahead and staged a show trial in the full sense of what a show trial is. There was no a single difference from that definition. He was accused of setting up and running, with the help of an Intelligence Service agent, a training center that was somewhere in Posazavi, God knows where, far from Jeseník. That he ran a training centre for agents, or rather, I don't want to say terrorists, because these were not terrorists, but a resistance group equipped with weapons, and I don't know what else, and things like that. To make that up without a sigle piece of evidence, that's fiction. I even know that they showed him a picture of my grandfather, Řepa, and said, 'That's the Englishman.' He said, 'No, that's my father-in-law,' and he got punched in the teeth. Then one of them, it wasn't my dad that did it, it was the whole group, when my dad was accused to be the leader of the resistance, he was just cornered, so he said he had buried it, something, I don't know what, that he had buried guns somewhere in the garden, so they dug up the whole garden at his place. They didn't find anything, so of course they beat him up, but he had two or three days of rest before they did that."