"Slavkovice is a small village. And we didn't find out about it there until we woke up and they were talking about it. And I know that I got to Nové Město na Moravě that day, I think I went there on a pioneer trip. And there I bought some newspapers where there was a proposal for the Tri-Federation. And there was a republic in three colours - Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia. So I was looking at it, and somebody said, 'It's all over, it's all gone.' Which was so telling, and not just the planning of how something could be changed. My mother was in the hospital those days, she had a broken leg in a cast, they sent her home right away. They took her home straight away, so we had to spend a bit of time with her afterwards. But there were no tanks in in Vysočina, as far as I know, we didn't experience anything like that in particular, a close encounter. Although, of course, we knew everything from the news, and we also watched all the programmes that were on TV at that time. And then it was Sunday, and we were in Nové Město in church, and the organist Večera was playing, and at the end, in the silence, his lady, the singing teacher and so on, was singing, 'Our Father, hear us, preserve our nation.' In that church."
"So there was talk about having to join the JZD because it was involuntary and there were slogans that the kulaks would be liquidated. And I remember my childhood dream, when I dreamt that our local radio was announcing and how the word liquidation sounded there. And so I knew it was something sad. And it kind of stayed with me. And then daddy also told me that when we kids were very young, which of course I can't remember, so because we were the children of kulaks, daddy didn't get many of those food stamps, as the rationing system was in place back then. But that one time he got a letter with just his name on it and a sugar ticket inside. So he could buy us kids some extra sugar. But the sender was anonymous."
"So when I was at the District Department of Church Affairs for my 1978 Primary, I asked to have my first mass in Jámy, and the secretary said to me, 'We know that you were trained in propaganda against us in the West anyway.' I say to him, 'Mr. Secretary, that is not true at all. I was sent there by the Ministry of Education, it was a state school, there was nothing religious there, that's not true.' 'And what about the slides you brought back?' And I remembered that when I finished my school-leaving certificate, on the advice of a classmate from Brno, in January I asked for permission to use the service passport we had from the Ministry of Education for a private trip to Italy. In January, they wrote to me that I was allowed to do so. Then when my classmates wanted to do this, and this was after Gustáv Husák had come in, that they wanted to use the passport to go to England, they were no longer allowed to do so. So they allowed me to go to Italy, so after graduation I hitchhiked to Rome. So I got there, and then I happily came back. I had little money, so with the last lire I had left I bought two sets of slide film. Sixty pictures of Rome and sixty of the Vatican. And with that, I came home. I returned my service passport and knew that the cage had fallen. And then a year later when I applied to the seminary and was accepted, the parish priest in Jámy told me that I could show them the pictures from Italy. And so on Sunday night after some devotional I showed the slides there. And I said, 'Here is the Castle of the Angels, here is the Basilica...' I gave minimal commentary on it, one night, a second night, it was shown and that was the end of it. Seven years later I was blamed for being there in the West training and preparing for ideological subversion against the regime."
Jan Peňáz, a Catholic priest working in Nové Veselí in the Žďár region and a well-known pilgrim, was born on 29 June 1951 in Slavkovice, today a part of Nové Město na Moravě. His parents were labelled kulaks by the regime. Jan thus experienced the end of their private farming and the beginnings of local large-scale production, which his parents had to join after they were forced to join a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). Jan was influenced by his family’s Christian faith from an early age. Thanks to the political relaxation of the 1960s, he was able to complete his secondary studies in Dijon, France. Later, the regime leaders accused him of training against them in the West. As a theologian, he experienced interrogations by the State Security (StB) and, as a priest, so-called well-meaning advice to join Pacem in Terris. After the Velvet Revolution, he became especially famous for organizing regular pilgrimages. In 2023 he was living in Žďár nad Sázavou.
