"The first thing and what is a solid anchor and what does not change is the Lord God and faith in Him, a personal relationship. If it were just a theory, it's not enough. He is the relationship. And I think even interpersonal relationships that are built on that foundation can stand. I'm not saying that believers are perfect. I'm not perfect either, you need to know that. But people are human, regardless of nationality, regardless of race, regardless of color, and I wish they could accept one another as the Lord God created us, but also accept and love us. That is probably the most important thing. Let us be people who at least tolerate people, but if possible love them and are friendly to them."
"Of course, they had to pay levies right away, especially after the forty-eight, and then they tried to get us into the cooperative that was formed in the 1950s. Every now and then we were told what to grow, how much of everything we had to give in, how much milk, how many eggs and so on. And when dad didn't want to join the co-op, they changed the fields. They ordered us to sow rape. It must be sown by mid-August. At the end of August, when the rape came up, they changed the field, gave us somewhere under the forest. All sorts of pressure, all sorts of pressure. As children we hardly knew butter. Because it was guarded against cream being skimmed off. Almost all the milk was being given in. We had sour milk and potatoes with it. That was a frequent lunch."
"Dad was in Svoboda's army and in the fighting when they were heading to Dukla, but still on Polish territory, he was badly wounded in September 1944. He was manning a heavy machine gun. It was a triple service - gunner, loader and carrier. Dad was the carrier. They were hit by a mine. One was killed instantly, the other was badly wounded and I don't know anything more about him, Dad was badly wounded. He was gradually treated and went through a series of operations until he got to a base in the South Caucasus. He hated it there, so they moved him to the North Caucasus and after six months he came home from the hospital on medical leave. In the meantime, the war was over. But the shrapnel from the mine stayed in his body until he died, so he was a war disabled person."
Dobroslav Stehlík was born on 29 July 1946 in the village of Štěpánovka in Volhynia in the Soviet Union as the eldest of three children to parents Vladimír and Amálie Stehlík. Both his parents came from families of post-Belarusian exiles and adopted the Baptist faith as their own in Volhynia. His father suffered a severe wound in the ranks of the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps in the fighting for the Dukla Pass, which left shrapnel in his body for the rest of his life. In 1947, the family emigrated to Czechoslovakia and settled in Vikýřovice, where they became involved in the local Baptist congregation. During collectivization, the parents were forced under duress to join a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD) and give up their fields. In February 1955, Vilém Pospíšil, a Baptist preacher from Vikýřovice, the uncle of the witness, was arrested and subsequently sentenced to three and a half years in a mock trial. Dobroslav Stehlík, as a believer and politically unorganized person, could not choose his future and had to go into agriculture. After studying at secondary school, he got to the University of Agriculture in Prague, thanks to a mistake of a party official. After graduating he worked at the state tractor station in Vikýřovice. In 1973 he married Mlada Křížová. Between 1974 and 1981 the couple had three children - Rut, Petr and Pavel. In the Vikýřovice Baptist congregation Dobroslav Stehlík served as a lay preacher, served on the national committee of the Baptist Youth Union, and was a member of the BJB (Unity of the Brethren Baptists) Central Council. In 1984 he was elected preacher of the Baptist Unity Church in Ostrava, where he served until 1995. As a preacher he was monitored by state security. In 1995, the family moved to Prague because Dobroslav Stehlík became the chairman of the BJB Executive Committee in the Czech Republic. After that, he worked as a Baptist preacher in Žatec. After his retirement, he returned to Vikýřovice, where he was living at the time of the filming in 2024.
