Vladimír Roháček

“When I was arrested I was nineteen and three days old. We arrived in Košice in the evening and there was a well-known police building. They took all my things through such small door and wrote down a list of them and they really wondered that, ‘How did you know that we will come to drive you away, because you have all your things here?’ I told them that I didn’t know it, that I had only prepared my things for going to hospital. An investigation began and as I didn’t know when they would call me for an interrogation I still felt a sort of uneasiness. And an investigator boasted, ‘We won’t beat you like we used to a few years ago, but you have to tell the truth!’ I had nothing to conceal, my conscience was clean. I didn’t know what would they fabricate about us, I mean mainly our accusation. I think, they immediately qualified our activities as subversion of the republic. However, I still didn’t know which of our activities they considered to be subversive and the like. They were gradually arresting other people, who were a bit older, and it went this way until March 3. The last arrested person was a clergywoman, Anna Kurčíková, because she had been visiting elderly and sick people, and thus she committed an offence of subversion of the republic.”

“One Sunday morning Tatra truck was driven up in front of the house, few pieces of furniture loaded on it and the family with a clerk put on an express train. They were moved to Czech part of the republic, to Mladá Boleslav district, to the village of Malé Všelisy. When I was a child I went to visit them with my parents and we experienced something strange there. The whole village gathered and everybody cried like it was a judgement day, at least the people characterised it so. And some local clerk said via the public address that this way we got rid of our class enemies and thus we had to rejoice. And it was even stranger that within a short period of time the whole story was broadcasted on the Radio Free Europe. Nobody of us knew how it could get there. Then, our relatives were driven to the state property, which was former estate of a man, who worked as a lawyer in Prague.”

“Modrý kríž (A Blue Cross) was founded by sisters Roy in Stará Turá as a missionary association of abstainers belonging to the Evangelical Church. So these people were the normal Protestants, they only weren’t formally accepted to the church and they stopped consuming alcohol on the spiritual basis thanks to the reading Bible and they were supposed to live practically according to the demands of Gospel. It was at the beginning of the 20th century and Modrý kríž ran till the year 1949, when the Ministry of Interior dissolved all the associations in Slovakia. For instance the Association of Fishermen or the Association of Philatelists as well as this association. I was nine at that time and Miloš was a year older. Well, they wrote into our judgment that we had been active at the time when Modrý kríž was running and as we really missed that we established this Modrý kríž under the guise of Baptists and later under the guise of Brethren Church in Stará Turá and that we were meeting illegally there, though gatherings of young people were a normal practice in the Brethren Church before and also after that.”

“Suddenly my father got summons to psychiatry in Trenčín. He went there and a senior consultant let him confine to a ward and prescribed some medication to him. Later he said that he had been totally besotted, without any initiative. However, when he had a bright moment, he wrote to his acquaintance, doctor Viera Roháčková, to Bratislava. He was a daughter of the translator of the Bible. And she didn’t hesitate and get on the train and came to Trenčín. The senior consultant was his former classmate, so he let her see my father and she told him, ‘Don’t take any other pills, the consultant is ordered to liquidate you.’ And she even didn’t leave until the senior consultant let my father go home. So she actually saved his life. It was such a common practice of those action fives or threes, I think, at the District National Committee in Trenčín and actually in each district that decided on life or death of people. Additionally, they also decided on person to be sentenced as well as the duration of the sentence and the like.”

“We appealed to the Supreme Court in Prague and we wrote the real facts about Modrý kríž association, which actually never existed and we definitely did nothing against the republic. The reason for our accusation of subverting the republic was following, ‘We, as young people and members of the Czechoslovak Union of Youth, solidified the idealistic worldview, religious worldview opposing the Marxism-Leninism. And Marxism-Leninism was an official ideology of our party and our government as well as of our republic and therefore we committed the offence of subverting the republic. ’It was written in the judgement. I even didn’t wait for three years, I coped with it inwardly and we waited that we would be transported to Prague. It was about June 20, in the same year and then, at the beginning of August the appellate procedure took place at the Supreme Court. The strange thing was that the Supreme Court acknowledged that we hadn’t established Modrý kríž association, but confirmed that we supported various religious activities. As we were sentenced with an aim to be re-educated, our sentences were a bit shortened. So finally Miloš was given two and a half years instead of four and I got two instead of three. Then, it was impossible to appeal against it again.”

“And what we were doing? At the beginning we used to sing a song, then we interpreted a part of Gospel, and then we prayed. After that we were singing and playing some common youth games. Those were our subversive activities. Of course, the main one was that we set up regular meetings of Baptists. Those were regarded as being illegal and we were accused of founding an illegal sect called Modrý kríž, though we learnt this fact only from the judicial decision. Moreover, I was encouraging Miloš Rataj in his spiritual activities through my letters.”

“We came to the camp on September 2, and the entire camp was completely frozen. Two young boys had been killed there two days earlier, supposedly during their escape attempt. The prisoners always waited for an amnesty, so they also did so on August 29, at the anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising. However, it was vain and those boys, I don’t know sixteen or seventeen years old, had to go crazy and entered the shooting zone. It was about three meters before the main fencing of the camp. There was a wire and warning that entering the shooting zone meant that guards could shoot without saying a word. And they went there and the guard, a former partisan, probably also was a good shot, so he got them both. It was how they welcomed us in the camp.”