"Sometimes those parish houses looked terrible. So old and even a bit musty, let's say. My wife and I always tried to keep the house as open as possible. As much as we could. We had always open door, we were always doing something for somebody, and we taught our children to do it too. Now, after forty years, they say, 'You didn't have time for us at all. We needed something and you weren't there. You were somewhere else. I feel it as a kind of gentle reproach from them, but we also know that the children are the ones who have the hardest time at the parish house. Because on the one hand, Dad is supposed to be a model of virtue when he goes up that pulpit every Sunday and he's supposed to say something, as Schweitzer used to say, about how the world goes on and how beautiful it's supposed to be, and the gospel. To open up good news for people. Then he comes home and some smacking is necessary because something got broken. We were preparing the kids for that back in Krabčice, too. We said, 'You're going to have a hard time because you're not going to get anything for free. You won't get into schools right away. It's all going to take longer. Maybe it will work, but later, like this. And it turned around in the year 1990. Not all of it, though. There was this communist spirit in those schools for a long time. For example, I had a few problems like that in Mělník when I used to visit those schools as a parish priest."
"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."
Evangelical priest Jan Opočenský was born on 10 April 1949 in Chotiněves. His father, Jan Opočenský, came from the village of Český Boratín in Volhynia and suffered serious arm injuries while fighting on the Eastern Front in the ranks of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps. He could not use one arm at all for the rest of his life. He met his wife, Jan’s mother Libuše Šeráková, only after his repatriation to Czechoslovakia. The family owned a farm and they were one of the last in Chotiněves to be forced to join a cooperative farm (JZD). Jan Opočenský was strongly influenced by the Chotiněves evangelical congregation from a very young age. This resulted in his later interest in studying theology. The priests Jan Dus and Miloš Rejchrt helped him a lot. He decided to study in 1969 under the influence of the self-immolation of Jan Palach. He graduated from the Faculty of Theology and in 1975 he started working as a parish priest in Strakonice. During the period of normalisation he was constantly monitored by State Security. They summoned him for several interrogations and tried to get him to collaborate. Jan Opočenský did not succumb. Until the Velvet Revolution in 1989 he was a priest in Krabčice and after 1990 in Mělník. He retired in 2015 after serving in the parish in Teplice. The recording was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Ústí nad Labem Region.
