Pater Benno Beneš

“All of a sudden ten guys appeared there and they looked similar to the two who had been in the train car. They had a badge with en edelweiss and they called themselves the ‘mountain rescue.’ I didn’t believe it. They wore black glasses so that people would not know where they were looking. One of them spoke perfect Czech... The receptionist of the mountain lodge under Vichren was suddenly called off and he was replaced by one of the guys with the edelweiss badge. It started getting dark... We went to brush our teeth by the stream outside – and a guy with the edelweiss badge appeared there. We walked past the lodge – and again, a guy with the edelweiss badge was there. I looked inside, and there were guys with edelweiss badges and a walkie-talkies. I thought that this was a closely watched operation. I didn’t sleep for the whole night. In the morning I said: ‘Gentlemen, there is nothing else to do, we need to separate. We will divide into three groups. One group will take the mountain path in the clockwise direction. The second group in the counter-clockwise direction’ – ‘we were to meet three days later – ‘and the third group will go to the sea.’ We set out for the hike to the next mountain lodge. As soon as we arrived there, the lodge owner welcomed us, but coldly, and he assigned a shared room for all of us, boys and girls – and with one Bulgarian guy. At that time, it was clear to me. The cops walked one hour behind us and so they got into a thunderstorm and a downpour that started afterward. Before they reached the lodge, they were soaked through and through. We thought that they indeed deserved this for their monitoring us.”

“Tension started in 1948. Salesians felt it as well. We staged one play, it was called ‘The Mexican Martyr.’ The plot of the play was that my father had been arrested for his faith. I, his son, was selling cigarettes. My father told me through the prison cell window that he was sentenced to death and that he would like to receive the Eucharist, the host, before his execution, and he asked me to bring it to him. I arranged it with a secret priest, who was earning his living as a chimney-sweeper. He brought the host to me and I inserted it into a silver pocket watch. I went to the prison’s director and asked him to see my father before his execution. He said: ‘Of course, we are not opposed to that.’ They searched me and they wanted to take my watch. (Tension growing in the audience…). I said: ‘Please, let me keep the watch, it is my keepsake from my confirmation.’ – ‘Fine, keep it then.’ (A sigh of relief in the audience.) ‘But since you might contract an infection, we need to give you an antidote.’ They gave me a shot of the antidote, but when it started to take effect during the meeting with my father, my arm began to grow stiff and it was a lethal injection. My father says, among other: ‘You are executed even earlier than I.’ I am dying in his arms, and the guards come and they lead my father to the execution. The same thing started to be apparent in the following history of our nation.”