A childhood belief about church

When I was about 5 we were taken to church for the first time, in Russian the word church sounds pretty similar to circus, so, I was convinced (and convinced my younger brother), that we were in a circus. When a dead person was brought in, I thought (and, again, explained to my brother) that it was a wounded person from war (what war, I wonder?), finally, when we were given the crosses and told to never show them to anybody (dad was in the Army, and those were times of the Soviet Union, being religious and, worse, going to church might cause serious trouble for him), we actually thought those were tiny swards, and we fought with them in the street, and told our friends that we were given the little swards in the circus...