Policemen were especially astonished. One in Zagreb said: “It would be good to show the mass media what is happening in this stadium, right here, where we see Serbians, Croats, Slovenians, Montenegrins, and others sitting next to one another in peace.”

In Budapest a policeman was asked to compare the Witnesses assembled in the huge stadium with the usual soccer crowds. He smiled, looked up, and said: “The difference is like that between heaven and earth.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he replied, “just look. Nobody is smoking, there is no litter anywhere, and the people are courteous. They do what you ask them to do.”

In Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, 14,654 met at Dynamo Stadium, a few of whom can be seen on the cover of this magazine. A Witness there asked one of the police captains whether his men had had to work hard during the convention. “No, the next time we will send you only two policemen.”

“Why two?” he was asked.

“When one falls asleep,” he jokingly responded, “the other one can look after him.”

Over the weekend torrents of rain inundated Budapest; more than two inches [5 cm] fell. But it did not stop the Witnesses. “It is fantastic! It is mindboggling!” a policeman was overheard to say. “They keep coming and coming . . . Nothing can hold them back.”

In Lvov, where 17,531 met at the Central Ukraine Stadium, a police official told one of the Witnesses: “For any other public event with so many people in attendance, we would need hundreds of policemen. For your convention we had ten, and they were not really needed.”

Then, revealing how much he was impressed by the convention, the official noted: “You excel in teaching others what is good, you talk about God, and you do not engage in violence. We were discussing why we used to persecute you, and we concluded that we had not listened to you and had not known anything about you.”