Václav Mach

“I was most afraid of the possibility that I would end up in a cell with a madman. Therefore, my first question to a new inmate on the cell usually was what he was there for. He told me that he was there for the Bible. This sent a shiver down my spine. I said to myself that he had to be mad. To go to jail for the Bible seemed completely inconceivable to me. Besides that, I didn’t know anything about the Bible at that point although I was a Catholic.”

“Once I went to the kitchen for a low-fat meal. We met and he wanted to pass on a secret note through me. So he handed me that secret note. There was nobody on the courtyard but a warden was standing behind the door and he saw it. So he stormed at me and took that secret note from me. I was sent to the camp commander who demanded me to tell him the name of the person who had given me the note. I said ‘no’ and thus I was sent to the correction.”

„It was such a tiny little man. In my eyes – the eyes of a 19-year-old – he was at least 70 years old, simply a grandpa. He had spent 6 years in a German concentration camp and in 1952, the communists arrested him again. He was a German who had lived in the borderlands so there really wasn’t much we could talk about. I remember that this 70-year-old grandpa washed himself with cold water every morning and that he did physical exercises on a regular basis. There was a man by the name of Neubauer who had been a supporter of Henlein. He had been imprisoned in the course of the anti-German retributions and he was summoned to the prison from a labor camp for some complementary investigation procedure. The two of them went along with each other very well because they spoke a common language, despite the fact that one of them was a former Nazi and the other one a Jehovah's Witness. They spoke together constantly. I didn’t understand their conversation except for the occasional word, like Jehova or Armageddon. I can only imagine what kind of things the Jehovah's Witness must have told that Henlein adherent! The wheel of history is turning and it trickles through to absurdities like this.”

“Mr. Mach is citing an excerpt from his indictment: ‘the defendant Václav Mach became a member of the Church of the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1960. He developed an interest for this creed in 1952. He’s been an active member of this church in Chrudim, regularly attending services. The defendant Mach has been very actively involved in the activities of the church and has been conducting evangelistic and preaching activities, interpreting the Bible, the Watchtower and other religious literature. This literature was found at his place during the searches. It has been evidenced that the defendant is one of the most active members, even though he was aware of the wrongness of his behavior and was aware that he’s been committing a crime. Despite this fact, he carried on in his activities. At the same time, based on his testimony at the main hearing there is concern that not even the hearings on this matter have contributed to his understanding that through his conduct he’s engaging in criminal activity’.”

“I was most impressed by his attitude towards me. He was about seven years older than I and he became my pillar in the hell we were in. He really managed to fill me with optimism in the darkest times. At times, he made me laugh so much that the prison warden – a Slovak devil in the disguise of a man – stormed into our cell and started yelling at us: ‘So you even dare to laugh here? And wouldn’t you like some women and wine?’ He screamed at us like a madman. So I liked him very much because of his friendly attitude towards me. Another thing that was astonishing about him and that I haven’t experienced with anybody else was that he was ready and willing to share his food rations with me, even though it was very little what he had. He saw a young boy who was starving and he helped me. This very much appealed to me. I was greatly impressed by him. He gave me new hope to solve all the troubles around us. In an environment like this, you start to think really hard about these matters. You really want to know what the truth is.”

“The stay in the communist labor camps was much harder for him because these were our people and not the Germans, speaking a different language and wearing hostile uniforms. These were our own people who spoke Czech. It was an assault on the human psyche, an attempt to destroy and morally discredit a man. It was much tougher in the respect that it was perpetrated by our own people. The communists presumed that when these prisoners were able to rise up against the Germans, they would take a stand against them as well.”