Mgr. Jan Opočenský

"And the third thing was that I invited, I think on 20 August 1978, the synod elder emeritus, Václav Kejř, that was a Sunday, to preach in our village and then to give a lecture on the subject: What the Church has given me and what it disappointed me in. He came with his wife, who is an American. She didn't speak Czech properly, but she had a nice conversation with our women, there were about fifteen of them. And when it was lunch time, we ate and then they sat down with coffee in front of the parish or church. And the chairs that they brought in would extend in a kind of an arc all the way to the pavement, but very far. It was almost impossible to walk there. Then I saw some photo that somebody had taken, and that's how it really was. I wasn't there. About three days later, a State Security member who was in charge of church matters, and I knew him, he came to me, he was dressed properly, and he said: 'I'm going to the District Committee of the Communist Party of the Czechoslovakia now, and we're going to deal with your case there, because you're accused of holding a sit-in demonstration here on the tenth anniversary of the entry of Warsaw Pact troops. So that was the last straw. I said, 'I'm not going to talk to you about this anymore. My superior is the church secretary.' I got in the car and went to see him. He was very surprised and said, 'Well, when a couple of old women sit down like that... That doesn't even qualify [as an offence] . Don't worry, we'll sort it out."

"They actually resisted for a long time. There were four farmers who didn't want to join the cooperative farm in Chotiněves. All the others were already involved there. They [communists] came to visit us, wanted to persuade us, but in such a kindly way. It wasn't strict or bad. After all, they had regard for my father's injury. The fact that he had a pension all his life. They all knew him, near and far. That's the one with the injured arm. One time when we were in this kind of a hurry during harvest, me and Grandpa were bringing grain, my mother was at the threshing machine, Grandpa was kind of checking it, and there were about two other people there. Suddenly a car stopped at our place and my uncle and aunt came and they brought my dad's uncle and aunt from the USA, from America, who had been visiting here for about a month. So we stopped doing all that, sat down at the table, and my mother made some food. He was looking at us for a while, our uncle. His name was John Opi. He shortened his name to Opočenský. Then he turned to my father and said, 'Jenda! How long are you going to endure this? Look, all over the world, cooperative farms are being formed. They're forming cooperatives. One man means little. And here you are, on this little farm.' It was three and a half hectares, a tiny farm, but Grandpa thought he had the whole world. So my father thought about it and said, 'You know, you're probably right. We'll go there [join the cooperative farm] then.' So we always laughed that a hard-core capitalist from the West came to advise my father to join a socialist cooperative farm."