Václav Mach

“The stay in the communist labor camps was much harder for him because these were our people and not the Germans, speaking a different language and wearing hostile uniforms. These were our own people who spoke Czech. It was an assault on the human psyche, an attempt to destroy and morally discredit a man. It was much tougher in the respect that it was perpetrated by our own people. The communists presumed that when these prisoners were able to rise up against the Germans, they would take a stand against them as well.”

“At that time, the inmates at Camp Equality talked about nothing else but the Jehovah's Witnesses. The Witnesses refused to mine iron ore because it was used for military purposes. The infamous commander of the camp, Paleček, who was an awful brute, would send them to the firing range in extreme weather conditions when it was frosty. Some of the inmates who were compassionate would send them hot coffee to minimize their frost bites. They would allegedly even put strong sleeping pills into that coffee in order to make them fall to the ground, because if they fell on the ground, they would take them to the infirmary.”

“I was most afraid of the possibility that I would end up in a cell with a madman. Therefore, my first question to a new inmate on the cell usually was what he was there for. He told me that he was there for the Bible. This sent a shiver down my spine. I said to myself that he had to be mad. To go to jail for the Bible seemed completely inconceivable to me. Besides that, I didn’t know anything about the Bible at that point although I was a Catholic.”

“Once I went to the kitchen for a low-fat meal. We met and he wanted to pass on a secret note through me. So he handed me that secret note. There was nobody on the courtyard but a warden was standing behind the door and he saw it. So he stormed at me and took that secret note from me. I was sent to the camp commander who demanded me to tell him the name of the person who had given me the note. I said ‘no’ and thus I was sent to the correction.”

„It was such a tiny little man. In my eyes – the eyes of a 19-year-old – he was at least 70 years old, simply a grandpa. He had spent 6 years in a German concentration camp and in 1952, the communists arrested him again. He was a German who had lived in the borderlands so there really wasn’t much we could talk about. I remember that this 70-year-old grandpa washed himself with cold water every morning and that he did physical exercises on a regular basis. There was a man by the name of Neubauer who had been a supporter of Henlein. He had been imprisoned in the course of the anti-German retributions and he was summoned to the prison from a labor camp for some complementary investigation procedure. The two of them went along with each other very well because they spoke a common language, despite the fact that one of them was a former Nazi and the other one a Jehovah's Witness. They spoke together constantly. I didn’t understand their conversation except for the occasional word, like Jehova or Armageddon. I can only imagine what kind of things the Jehovah's Witness must have told that Henlein adherent! The wheel of history is turning and it trickles through to absurdities like this.”

“Mr. Mach is citing an excerpt from his indictment: ‘the defendant Václav Mach became a member of the Church of the Jehovah's Witnesses in 1960. He developed an interest for this creed in 1952. He’s been an active member of this church in Chrudim, regularly attending services. The defendant Mach has been very actively involved in the activities of the church and has been conducting evangelistic and preaching activities, interpreting the Bible, the Watchtower and other religious literature. This literature was found at his place during the searches. It has been evidenced that the defendant is one of the most active members, even though he was aware of the wrongness of his behavior and was aware that he’s been committing a crime. Despite this fact, he carried on in his activities. At the same time, based on his testimony at the main hearing there is concern that not even the hearings on this matter have contributed to his understanding that through his conduct he’s engaging in criminal activity’.”