Mgr. Jan Fatka

"Before the ordination - sometime in May - I sent it out to various people, as I had addresses, and I always added that I asked people to pray for the good outcome of the First Mass and for the evil spirit to leave Prachatice. Why I said that, what I meant by that, Lord God willing, I know a little bit. But one priest, then they told me - who I guess, but there could have been more people like that, so he had no sympathy for it and took it to the regional church secretary. And he was such a scoundrel, such a bastard, Drozdek was his name. In seventy-two he actually tortured [Bishop] Hloucha to death. Because one afternoon he wanted to blackmail him, already a little drunk, and he yelled at him there all afternoon, and then he [Hloucha] had a stroke and died by morning. So he was such a boss in his junkyard and an uncultured man. So he got it. Although he didn't boycott the ordination, it was already pre-arranged at the level of the ministry, but the next day, on Monday, the parish priest from Klatovy came to me, and he said: 'Look, Drozdek is inviting you to his office. We're supposed to be there with the secretary of Pilsen and I'm supposed to be there with you.' So we came there in the afternoon, and he started - what does that mean, what did I mean, and that it can't be done that way. And he was already drunk, he was already drunk. And I tried to be correct, but then I raised my voice too. So we argued there for about three hours, and then he banged on the table and said, 'So, over my dead body, you're not going to South Bohemia!'"

"Well, and when it didn't work for years, for two or three years maybe, they couldn't make a cooperative farm there, so in the end they did it by confiscating what he had, they couldn't do any more, and they took away the best animals and the best machines - he had a thresher, he was so modern that he wasn't afraid to invest in it. So my mother stayed there single. She was 23 years old and Grandpa's youngest son, her brother, was 13 years old. So there was nowhere to go. So she even joined the cooperative farm herself for six months, out of desperation, because they took all the stuff they had there. So then he wrote a letter to the President or whoever asking for a pardon to give it back, that he had cattle there, even a dog, two sows and so on, and that he had nothing to give it to eat. That the animals were looking to see what they would eat, and she had nothing for herself. So when they couldn't expropriate it from her, she didn't do anything, so they made it so that she didn't earn anything, so she had to go there. But again, that was the advantage of that particular neighborhood or village way or mentality, that she went there, so they took it away or they left the cows even in that barn, but they declared it a cooperative farm. But after six months she was so nervous and unhappy about it and how it didn't work and how nothing just didn't work, and they still gave her jobs for nothing. So she said she wanted to go back, and they let her. So she, a young girl, after six months of being in a cooperative farm, she went back to private status."