“They were searching through there, and I had a sermon in the last drawer of the cupboard, as I was a lay preacher. But I had permission. They read through the sermon, trying to find some seditious language. But we didn’t have anything seditious in our sermons, that wasn’t our aim, our aim was to preach God’s forgiveness. But they reported it as seditious activity, so they locked me up and took me to Hradec.”
“I was allocated for the mines in Ostrava. I arrived there. I was there for one shift, and then I fled back home again. Of course, they reported it, and a gendarme came to pick me up. I lived in Přepychy near Opočno. I let myself be taken back. He left, and the next day I legged it again. Simply, I was afraid [of the forced labour]. So they set up a search for me. During Hitler’s time I found myself a place through one friend, and I was employed as a worker at the company Schwarz in Bukovany, near the town of Sázava. We were repairing houses there because the Germans had smashed them up. I had been there for some time when the field gendarmes came, Germans, and they locked us up. But they left it as an open prison camp because we were working in the SS barracks, we were laying down some tiles there. We were working for them, so they didn’t lock us up into a closed prison, but into a slightly more relaxed one.”
“That was nothing. We had a spiritual intent, and they took it to be a station of sedition. They mainly wanted to destroy the Pardubice station. At the time we were there just as a station, not a congregation. So Communist Party secretary Jonáš said: ‘Within a year, there won’t even be two left to gather in Pardubice.’ Meaning that the members will run away. But nothing happened. That was in our house [that we had] from my wife. There was a room down below, that’s where we would meet. Those were the beginnings. Afterwards, the members, as far as I know, went to other [churches]. Baptists and others.”
Karel Kalvach was born on 26 November 1924 in Hradec Králové. During World War II he was drafted into forced labour in the Ostrava mines. However, he fled home after the very first shift. A gendarme escorted him back to Ostrava, but Karel Kalvach ran away again. Through a friend he secured an illegal job working for a construction firm in Bukovany near Benešov. The place was not very safe though, because at the time the Waffen SS had training grounds in and around Bukovany. Karel Kalvach was arrested in the end, and he was taken to a special correctional facility for people who had been avoiding work or sabotaging it. After serving a six-week sentence he was supposed to return home, but instead he headed off to relatives in Hradec Králové, where he remained under false identity until the end of the war. In Hradec Králové he became acquainted with the local Church of Brethren community, and he gradually came to see his faith in God as giving his life its meaning. After the war he and his wife moved to Pardubice, and the basement under their house was turned into a station of the Church of Brethren. Karel Kalvach became one of its lay preachers, and together with other members he founded a choir for spiritual songs. He had no interest in politics, nonetheless, in 1962 he was arrested by State Security, and the Regional Court in Hradec Králové punished him with two years of prison for subversion of the state. He served his sentence in the correctional work camp Bytíz near Příbram, where the prisoners worked in the nearby uranium mines. He kept his faith, and even after his release he remained a member of the Church of Brethren. Karel Kalvach died shortly after being interviewed, in July 2014.
