Mgr. Václav Hurt

“I remember the interrogation well. The offer of collaboration was somewhere in the background. But it was probably not the main issue. They rather tried to scare me. The greatest number of interrogations that I experienced was in my first parish in Merklín in western Bohemia. As for my schoolmates, it varied. One of them was a friend of his. I could not understand this. Then I even refused an invitation to some class reunion because he was there and because I did not trust him He thought that if he told them something about me, he would trick them and he would then be able to have some positive influence on them. Well, that was very naïve. Most of my schoolmates told me about it if they had been contacted. Some of them were invited to a pub, some of them just passed through. Like my good friend Pavel Ruml, whom they had not contacted at all during his studies. But they attempted to put him to prison while he was doing his military service and they nearly succeeded. Some counter-intelligence officer was after him and he accused him and Pavel was tried. So there were efforts like that.”

“The first interrogation came about three days after I had moved there. They took me to Stod and the offer was clear. ‘Vicar, you have just moved here and you certainly do not wish to move again soon, and we do have the authority to make decisions in this matter. It would be therefore advisable if we were on good terms. For start, if you could tell us, for instance, who goes to church on Sundays. We know it anyway.’ If I had said it to them and signed, they would have been able to blackmail me the next time and threaten that they would tell it to the people that I had informed upon them to the police. I had been refusing any form of cooperation from the beginning and I had them rewrite some portions or I told them that I would not sign them. So we eventually found a way to get along with one another. They were eventually sending me notices and I was going to the police station in Stod. I talked with them. I tried to talk about general things, about nature, and mountains, rivers, and they always turned the conversation so that they would get some names from me. I think that they were not too successful. It lasted for about a year during which I had about one interrogation a month. Then during the second year, they turned their attention to people who were going to the vicarage and they stopped interrogating me. There was a kind of a trend; one time they took about twenty young people for interrogations. Some girls were fifteen years old. A Volha car arrived and took them from their homes to Pilsen, in most cases. They even underwent five-hour long interrogation sessions where they were completely alone.”