RNDr., CSc. František Reichel

“Although at the beginning we did not have the proper training, a guy who was a Seventh-day Adventist started [the military service] with us. His name was Petr Hrdinka and he was from Nezdenice, Nezdenice 82. He was a sincere believer and he insisted that he would not touch any work on Saturday since the Bible says so. That was something for the comrades: he was disrupting the battle-readiness of the unit on Saturday. We tried to talk him out of it. He knew that I was going to church as well, because I went whenever I could. ‘Petr, do you really need to do this, can’t you deny yourself…? It’s in the Bible, after all, that when you serve the sick…’ – because he really was on duty in the infirmary – ‘so can’t you just…?’ Or he was on duty as a so-called supervisor. He said: ‘No, I can’t.’ And when we pressed him, he said: ‘Look, there are enough of you, and so you can be on duty. You know that I can work on Sundays, so you can do it instead of me.’ But the superiors learnt about it and they were tough with him. He insisted that he would not touch anything, not even a submachine gun. In that case, that meant [the military prison – transl.’s note] Sabinov and five or six years of imprisonment for disobeying the order. He was willing to accept it. The comrades then called me and later I learnt that it was even escalated to the counter-intelligence unit. They told me that this guy was a dangerous element and that it was necessary to deal with it. They argued that we were one team and that we as comrades were supposed to help him get rid of religious prejudice. I don’t know why they turned to me, perhaps they suspected something, too, or perhaps because I was the oldest one there, and they ordered me to come later and report about it. They said that they were giving him four or five weeks, I don’t remember how much time, to return to a regular military regime. I was worried about it a bit, but then I got an idea. I thought it was a good idea. Since I was in charge of the medicine store, I was going to a pharmacy to replenish the supply of medicines. I went to the pharmacist and I asked her: ‘I would like to send a car every Saturday and we would come for our supply of medicines.’ I wrote the orders for him, I made him get into the car with a driver and the driver took him there. The driver then brought the list of orders to the pharmacist and I had agreed upon it with her beforehand that she would always allow Petr to sit somewhere in the back of the pharmacy and that at one o’clock they would return to the unit and we would unload the medicines there. It seemed to be doable, and when the comrades called me about three weeks later, I said: ‘It looks good, the comrade works on Saturdays and I gave him specific assignments so that I can watch over him and see to it that he is not idle. I send him to bring medicines and to replenish the medicine stock - we always order medicines for the whole week. Before, I had been going more often, but he is busy now.’ And then I went to report for the second time and I said: ‘Well, comrades, it works.’ And the whole operation was thus over. We were then practicing it in this way all the time.”