Vladimír Roháček (1940)

Biography

“At school even a scrubwoman had to be an atheist.“

Vladimír Roháček was born in 1940 in the village of Beniakovce in eastern Slovakia. After the communist takeover, his family experienced one affliction after another. At first, the regime harshly affected the life of Vladimír’s grandfather, Ondrej Halás, who was a “local kulak”. Even though he joined the agricultural cooperative, he didn’t manage to avoid being imprisoned. After a year in an agricultural cooperative, he was wrongfully accused of delivering insufficient quotas, while in fact they only had to carry out the plan on number of convicted kulaks. Ondrej Halás was chosen to be a victim. He was sentenced to three years of imprisonment and a financial penalty of hundred thousand crowns. If he hadn’t paid it, he would have spent another year in jail. His family was deprived of the whole property and their relatives were driven to Czech part of the republic, where they had to work on the state property. After serving his sentence, the family returned to their native village of Beniakovce, where they started to build a new life. Another persecuted person in the family was Vladimír’s father, a teacher Emanuel Roháček, who was in a centre of the State Security’s attention for his activities such as writing letters of complaints, defending his father in law, Ondrej Halás, protesting against injustice in judiciary as well as for his religious belief. After he was dismissed from school for his “idealistic worldview”, he kept small crosses made of white marble, which were initially meant to be hung in classrooms, and his colleague snitched it to the State Security. He was confined to psychiatry, where they tried to liquidate him. Fortunately, they were not successful. The third was Vladimír himself, who was studying in Košice at the beginning of the year 1959 and taking part in Baptist meetings of youth. The State Security was really afraid of the similar youth gatherings and thus the members of religious groups were usually called “subversives of the republic”. Vladimír along with his friend Miloš Rataj were found guilty in a fabricated lawsuit of alleged establishment of the sect called Modrý kríž (Blue Cross). Modrý kríž actually was an association of Evangelic abstainers founded in the early 20th century. The fact that they founded the sect was sensation in all newspapers. He was given three years, so he appealed to the Supreme Court, which later acknowledged that he hadn’t founded the “sect”, but shortened his sentence only by a year as he “needed re-education” for supporting the religious activities. He went through the remand centres in Košice and in Pankrác and then he served his two-year sentence in Lipkovice camp near Litvínov. After coming back home, he was employed as a technical education teacher; however, in the period of the so-called normalisation, he was dismissed again for his religious belief. Subsequently, he found a new job and even though it was worse paid and more physically demanding, he had a clear conscience that he didn’t give up his belief. After 1989 the administrative changes made him professionally disadvantaged and unemployed for some time, but he considered the fall of the regime to be necessary for opening the door into a free world, mainly for his children.

Grandfather – Saboteur of Supplying the Poor

“The trial at the Regional Court was held on October 29, 1952 and it set aside the judgment of the District Court and reclassified his offense to sabotage under the section 85, paragraph 1, letter A. And he committed it the way that he as a village rich, who owned a total land of 27 hectares out of which 24 hectares was arable soil, it varied depending on the record, 23 or 24 hectares of arable soil, didn’t meet his delivery quotas, because he didn’t deliver 38 quintals of wheat, 5 and a half quintals of sugar beet, 57 quintals of chicory, 1.75 quintal of potatoes, 534 litres of milk, 13 kilograms of pork, and 385 kilograms of beef. In the same year he also bred by one sow less than he had planned. Consequently, the Regional Court sentenced the accused man under the above paragraph to three years of imprisonment. Additionally, he was given a fine of 100,000 crowns in the old currency and if he hadn’t repaid it, he would have been given one more year of imprisonment. And under the section 47 the court also decided on the forfeiture of all his property and loss of his civil rights for five years. An appeal of the accused to the Regional court was rejected, so his sentence was even tighten up. Then, my grandfather commenced his three-year sentence, which he served in full extent.”

Eviction of Grandparents to Czech Part 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.”

Father in Psychiatry

“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 won’t beat you like we used to a few years ago...”

“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.”

The Way of Subverting the Republic

“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.”

Modrý Kríž Association and Its Dissolution in 1949

“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.”

Shortening the Sentences on Appeal

“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.”

Reception in Lipkovice camp

“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.”

The story and videoclips of this witness were put together and published thanks to the financial support of EU within the programme Europe for Citizens – Active European Remembrance.