Yet, their sheer joy could hardly have exceeded that of the 74,587 in Prague and 40,601 in Budapest who assembled in the largest stadiums in Czechoslovakia and Hungary,

A 59-year-old Czech Witness, who had spent eight months in solitary confinement about 40 years ago because of her faith in God, said: “Many of us who lived in Prague dreamed about a big convention that could be arranged in this stadium, but never did we believe that this dream would come true in such a marvelous way.”

Two weeks before the Prague convention, August 9 to 11, a city newspaper, Večerník Praha, noted: “Charged with high treason and with disrupting socialism, Jehovah’s Witnesses were put in Communist jails for many years.” After explaining that the city would soon be host to tens of thousands of Witnesses, the article concluded: “You are not likely to meet so many kind and smiling people in Prague at any other time than during the second weekend of August.”