Josef Odvárka

“They were probably after the property above all, but they also wanted to eliminate our faith and to make us weaker in faith, because they knew that our parents were raising us as Christians and teaching us from the Bible, and they did not like it. I remember the prosecuting attorney yelling: ‘How did you actually intend to raise these children?’ Our parents raised us well, and this question was out of place, because my mom had even received an award as an exemplary mother some six months before my father was arrested; the municipal administration sent an award to mom, certifying that she was an exemplary mother – she has raised six children. She already had the three of us at that time. And then something like that happened!”

“Dad writes in one of the letters: ‘Do not believe what people say.’ There were rumours in Dvůr that some weapons had been found in our house, and that we even had a radio transmitter at home. (‘I remember it, they said it in the court, and some witness claimed this, but I have never seen that man in my life,’ Mrs. Odvárková says.) Some witnesses were present in the court, but we did not know all of them. I knew that they were saying this, and dad probably knew about it, and he knew that communists were influencing the people, and he thus warned mom: ‘Do not believe what people say!”