“I didn’t think that I’d become a priest. I used to stutter and all kinds of things. But my mom who was very religious made a promise to God. She promised that in case she got married and gave birth to a boy as her first child, she’d ordain him a priest. It is a bit biblical but it’s exactly what happened.”
“The train rolled through Silesia and somewhere in Gliwice we were halted and put on a dead-end track. The train was surrounded by Polish soldiers with bayonets mounted to their rifles. They would say: ‘You Czechs had a good life. We’ll send you to Siberia, not to Czechoslovakia’. They were serious about it and the Russians would have agreed with it. The situation was getting pretty bleak and some would even start to cry. Our leader tried to negotiate with the chief of the train station but he was not to be persuaded. He told him that our transfer had been agreed and paid for and that he didn’t understand why they wouldn’t just let us pass. Our leader was the teacher Hovorka who spoke Polish and Czech and he found out that the Soviet advisors had already been installed in the place. At the train station, they rather had the role of organizers and guards. When the Soviet soldier heard what was happening and when he learned that we were Czechoslovaks, he said: “You are our friends, your army, the army of General Svoboda, is with us’. He immediately called that station chief and scolded at him. He yelled at him that he wanted within so many and so many minutes a written report that the train had been dispatched to Czechoslovakia.”
“So I came up with the idea to organize a specific German congregation. The regular Czech congregations were held every Sunday, the German ones were held every other Sunday in the little hall. It used to be very crowded in there. To make it more interesting, I would play some music there. They would tell me that I can’t be Czech, that I had to be German, since my German sermons were better than the Czech ones. I was good at German and I made good use of my knowledge of the language. It turned out that the Church didn’t place me here for no reason but exactly for my knowledge of German. German people came.”
The Baptist priest Richard Novák was born on April 24, 1930, in the Polish district of Kępno to Czech parents whose ancestors arrived in the 18th century to what was then Prussia seeking religious freedom. He was the eldest of 13 children. His parents ran a small farm. Richard attended a Polish school and after the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany, he was allowed to attend a German school. In 1945, his father was for a short time forced to work in Odessa in the Soviet Union. After his father’s return, the family decided to return to Czechoslovakia. They found a new home in Bezdružice near Mariánské lázně. Richard helped with the work at the parents’ farm, attended an agricultural school but later went to a Baptist seminary and initiated a religious career, in line with the wish of his mother. However, the Baptist seminary was dissolved and Richard completed his studies at an evening school. In 1950, he enrolled to study theology at the Theological Faculty. His studies were interrupted between the years 1952 and 1953, when he had to serve in the auxiliary military battalions (PTP). After his military service he completed his studies of theology. He was placed in the Baptist parish in Broumov, which previously had a strong German religious community. For the remaining group of Germans he would give sermons in German. From 1968 to 1982, he served in Vysoké Mýto and then returned to Broumov where he still lives today.
