Pavel Odehnal

Prison tea, nutcase´s tea, if you know it - it was usually Ceylon, and it was poured with soup spoons into aluminium pots. You'd pour it in, let it sit for a bit and it made your teeth chatter when you drank it, so it was strong. That was stronger than coffee. And it hyped you up. It's like, if you drink ten coffees, it does things to you. And it was common to drink it there. You weren't hungry, you could stand it. It was a kind of dope back then. When I saw how it was going on there, every prisoner had his own pot and he had a mark on it. They would bring me the pots and when the water was boiling, I would pour tea for them and take it to their rooms. It was quiet in the corridor, I had maybe five or six pots there and I had fun bringing it to their room. By remembering whose pot it was, I brought it to them, talked to them for a while and it was all calm. The commander was happy, the mates were happy. That's kind of how I managed to keep it calm. But a lot of times it wasn't calm. In the winter, there was snow clearing between the wires. Especially when we had afternoon shifts, it was done during the morning. The warden came and said, 'Five people for the snow.' So I ran into the smoking room and I said: 'One, two, three, four, five: snow removal.' There was one Roma guy among them. And when I picked him out, he suddenly said: 'How do you dare, you're racist, you're against me and I'll beat you up.' Behind me was a guard who jumped on him, g´dragged him across the smoking room and said: 'Leave. And don't even look at him crookedly, or you'll see what you're going to get.' So from then on I was kind of at peace and they respected me. They called me Abbe. That I always tried to touch the spiritual side, but not too much, just subtly. And by trying to talk to everybody privately, we had a good relationship and it was cool."

"Everyone counted on the fact that it was being monitored by the regime. We tried to be as inconspicuous as possible, and the copies we made were especially kept secret. We knew that if we were caught with the magazines, it would result in prison time. And because of the preaching ministry, I went to prison a second time. That was in 1986. The preaching ministry was done by coming to a village, going through the village and moving on. And whoever we met, we talked to, but we didn't come back. One or two conversations in one village and we went away. And we were in Bošovice, and we passed the municipal office, and there was a gentleman throwing coal into the cellar window. I just got into a conversation with him, we were sort of talking and I mentioned the Bible briefly. The gentleman didn't respond, so we talked for a while and then we left. We came to the car and we see a police car. So they stopped us and said, "What are you doing here?" - "We're out for a walk." - "No, you're coming with us! So they took us to Slavkov and told us that we were doing pastoral work as Jehovah's Witnesses, that it was against the law. The policeman said, 'You know what? We're not going to make a big deal out of this. We know you're a Jehovah's Witness, you give us your Watchtower magazines that you have at home and we'll close it down.' So I said, 'Okay.' They took me home, I took the box with the Watchtowers out from under the bed, I gave it to him, we went back to the police station and he said, 'Okay, and we have the documents and that's actually the reason to arrest you.' You are a Jehovah's Witness and you are spreading this here.' I had a trial in Vyškov and I was sentenced to a year."