Jan Zach

"Our boys, when the kids were gathering around the church... As it happens, the kids were excited, they were making a mess. Slapping each other and stuff. My brother couldn't watch it. It's not possible that they're growing like wood in the forest. They have to have fun to be calm then at the altar. So they just have to play football. It was after Dad died, 1954, the cruelest time, terrible persecution. And the communists didn't like to see anyone at the altar except old people, poor grandmothers. Because they thought religion had to be whiny, whiny. Religion couldn't be joyful. And my older brothers used to say, these kids have to go somewhere. So they'll play football around the church. Of course, they [occasionally broke] some windows, even the church windows. There was nothing we could do. Anyway, the kids could go somewhere to play. My brother had that teacher blood in him. My goodness, the kids must know something about religion. So he introduced a so-called Bible class for these boys. I still have it in my notebooks to this day. There were numbered pages and the kids had to learn what the Bible was, tell Bible stories. They had to know them by heart because the catechist would tell them. And based on those narratives were built concepts like reverence for the father, reverence for keeping the given word, and all that stuff. And those kids absorbed it! And especially reverence for the Scriptures."