Josef Pokorný

“The Communist Party was a greatly skilled organizer. They immediately divided each city into sections. An official was assigned to each section. From the organizational point of view, this was a very smart move. People from our church rented a house in the border region, and for a brief time during my work there, my task was to go from door to door and call on people. Thanks to this I got to know all the people and they began to accept me very favourably. They became friends with me. There was even one communist, and he regarded me as somebody who was loyal to communism and who was a believer at the same time. He didn’t have an idea how much the two things stood in conflict. He was a good-natured man. A committee was formed, which was to contact all the people and inquire and investigate who was an adherent of whom and how he or she thought. This man became the chairman of this committee for our section of the town. What happened – and now I talk about it almost as if it was a joke, but I certainly didn’t feel that way back then – was that the committee called on me. The man I knew was there as a record-keeper, and he had a colleague with him. They were always going in pairs. The other was apparently tasked with finding out what I was. It was apparent that I irritated him, because he supposed that those who agreed with the regime were all Party members. I was not in the Party. The man I knew, the one who was taking notes, said: ‘Mr. Pokorný agrees with everything, only he is a believer.’ But this was not enough for the second man and he asked me: ‘And why are you not in the Party then?’ At that moment, the following response occurred to me: if I had thought about it before, I would have never come up with that. I told him: ‘You know, I cannot agree with absolutely everything.’ ‘And what is it that you disagree with?’ ‘For example with the claim that man originated from ape.’ He was flabbergasted, and he didn’t know what to say. He said to his colleague: ‘Write it down.’ The other man was sensible enough to say: ‘No, we cannot record this.’ Then I rephrased the sentence: ‘My world view is based on the Bible, and therefore I cannot be a member of any organization.’ They wrote this into their papers. Later I heard that they had had a meeting where they discussed my case. They spoke about my not being a party member, and somebody there allegedly stood up and said: ‘Comrades, remember, that we have the National Front and that there are non-Communists there as well.’ Thanks to this I have passed.”