Stanislav Pavlík

“Then came the night: Action K. StB policemen stormed into the monastery and they ordered us to pack only the most important things. They told us that they would transport us to another place where we would be able to carry on in our monastic life. We didn’t know where they were taking us. We were guarded by the police. I was an uneducated man, all in all, I have not done any study yet, but while I was there, I received the New Testament, which was translated by Dominican Father Škrabal. By chance I opened it on the Gospel of Luke 12:11: ‘When you are brought before synagogues, rulers and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say,‘ Luke 12:12: ‘for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say.‘ This verse has actually been guiding me throughout my entire life, and that’s why I’m talking about it. Then they transported us to Broumov. The Dominicans from Prague, who had been taken there a week earlier, were already there, and they gave us a welcome.”

“An electricity distribution station was being built there. It was a considerable distance to transport material there. I got two bricklayers and I myself was bringing bricks to them. They were building the upper floor and I was standing at the bottom and passing them the bricks. The wheelbarrow was quite sturdy and I could carry up to seventy bricks in it. I balanced the load so that I would be able to push the wheelbarrow up there. They needed the workers to compete with one another, and there was I with such an outstanding work performance. They thus suggested that they would promote me to a lance-corporal’s rank. This has not happened to any other person in the priests’ column and in the entire Auxiliary Technical Battalions. There was certain danger, too, because the others might suspect that I was collaborating with them. But I was probably a person so simple that it has not occurred to anyone. For me, this promotion was ridiculous. There were several battalions in Komárno. There were two columns made of priests: one of them was transferred to Podbořany, and one of them was left in Slovakia. I stayed in Slovakia the whole time. Then they transported us to Komárno. There set up a platform there and we were to march there to receive our rewards. I didn’t even know how to march properly. I survived it. The rewards included an alarm clock, for instance, which I would have liked, but I didn’t get it. I got a game of chess, but I wasn’t a chess player, and I still have it even now.”

“Since I was a priest, they made me a commander of the room, and we were thus left there without any other guard. There was one Dominican priest in our room. We would get up one hour before the wake-up time, at about 5 in the morning, and put our clothes on. The priest was then able to celebrate the mass, because he had a copy of prayers to Virgin Mary called Salve. It was still dark, and I used a torch to shine into Marek’s missal book and we held the liturgy. This way we could thus stay connected to what kept us going.”