doc. Ing.,CSc. Josef Šnejdar

"The first shock came when we went to vote in the first election in our lives in 1946 and the communists received over 40 percent of the votes. Even the People's Party, which we voted for, got only 27 percent. That was the first hint at what was happening. But the Jesuits believed then that once the joy of liberation and the gratitude to the Soviet Union subsides, everything would go back to normal democratic relations like during the First Republic. That didn't happen. Various attacks began, and many were levelled against the Church. The fiercest attacks came in 1950 when the Jesuits including some of leaders of the order, nine in all, were sentenced to a total of 132 years in Leopoldov, where they had to stay each for about 16 years."

"We were informed, we subscribed to all the newspapers, and listened to the radio. It was already a progressive stage of the monastery in Brno. My superiors believed it was temporary, though, and they trusted Gottwald who had said that he would not take any measures against monasteries. Of course, that was not true at all. It held true only until 1950. The communists had lied ever since the beginning, but we were preparing for it. For example, on the orders of Father Zgarbík, I took a suitcase full of golden chalices and monstrances to a student to hide and we walled it up in a wall in a villa in Brno because we were concerned they would take it all away."

"We went into civilian life as second-class citizens with a 'highly politically unreliable' cadre profile. My qualification was listed in my military ID as 'auxiliary construction worker'. Imagine becoming a civilian for the first time in so many years - at the age of 27. I was in a Jesuit boarding school for many years, then interned in a convent, then with the PTP. I had no idea about the world. It was cruel. I didn't know what I was going to do. Out of desperation, I went back to Brno, but no one would hire me. When they found I was with the PTP and a former Jesuit, they showed me the door and wanted nothing to do with me. Then I saw an advertisement in Lidová demokracie; the Keramos plant located in Malý trh in Prague, now a jewelry store, was looking for a taskmaster. I was very reluctant to go there, but I was running out of money and I had to start somehow. I went there and they hired me. When I explained how I came to be a taskmaster, they took me as their own. The head of the HR section was a former German soldier who had worked with the Germans in Norway; the secretary's husband was in prison as a former factory proprietor; and all the Keramos staff were private contractors, reactionaries to the bone. There was no work being done, but there was a lot of swearing, cheating, and stealing, and I fit in with this company."

"The secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee, Kempný, was in charge, a civil engineer. He came to Vyšehrad, and their proxies were there. They called themselves the 'first division' and everybody had a proxy. The secretary of the CC, deputy prime minister Rázl, and two or three other ministers all came and started to blame each other. Our company director and the deputy prime minister took the brunt of it. I heard all of that later from government commissioner Suchan whom minister Polák had appointed. He said, 'Comrade Director, don't you have an engineer in your company of twelve thousand who can manage the Palace of Culture?' He said, 'Yes, we do, and he would do it. But the ROH and the Communist Party won't allow it. He's a former Jesuit, he's been to jail, he was with the PTP...', and Rázl said, 'Right, he works hard, and those who could do it are rare. Bring him on.' The commissioner says: 'Comrades, are you crazy? We can't have a former priest saving the Palace of Culture project from ruin! No way! Think about it! Can't you see how dissidents and reactionaries would ridicule you for that?"

"We came to Bohosudov. Bohosudov used to be an Our Lady of Sorrows pilgrimage destination in the north. It was a boarding grammar school, excellent and revered during the First Republic. The building was so gloomy, though. It was enclosed by arcades and walls, and there was a garden. They made a sort of covered corridor through the garden, and that was the way they took us to work. They brought us there and put about forty of us in; it was terrible. I looked at the old priests in the evening. They didn't know how to undress, they didn't know hygiene, they didn't know what to sleep in, they didn't know anything. It was terrible. We were totally isolated for the full six months that we were there. Nobody spoke to us - why we were there, how long we were going to be there, what we were going to do... It was just darkness, nothingness. It was terrible. My memory is good, but I don't remember a thing about those six months. I can't dig a single memory out of my head. What we ate, how we did the laundry, or how we washed. It was like an existentialist period. I was thinking, "I am, but I don't exist."

"I told my parents and they didn't say anything. I don't know what they were thinking; I just left and was gone. The gist of it was that a Jesuit must free himself from all belongigns, relatives, and friends. I didn't see them for years. I didn't come back to my home village or see my parents." - "How long did you stay away?" - "Until later, like 1950." - "That was a very tough decision, at sixteen..." - "It was bold and hard and not easy. You had to be disciplined and study for hours and hours. We spoke Latin; all the lectures in philosophy were in Latin and it was a tremendous strain on the memory. For three years, all we did in philosophy classes was study from dawn to dusk. Our monastic duties were kept to a minimum."

"It was very difficult. We meditated every day, kneeling on our knees for an hour. We did penance twice every day, read ascetic books, studied, and worked manually because the Jesuits used to work in hospitals and in missions. What we did was only a watered-down version of it, though - we washed the dishes and so on, but our chief task was getting into the monk mindset in order to become the Jesuits. That took two years. The hardest thing we went through was the thirty days of the spiritual exercises. Four times a day, we did meditation for an hour, and we meditated about hell at midnight. Father Škárek told us about it. He was skinny, with bony hands, and he portrayed hell to us in such a way that we were determined never to commit sin."

"Two policemen with submachine guns burst into my room on 13 April at midnight, searched the room, and made me undress and change into civilian clothes. They took me like a criminal downstairs where they had gathered the other priests. There were sixteen of them, monks included. We were not allowed to speak to anyone, and they kept pushing us to keep us apart. They took us to a bus and sat us down, each of us alone, with two policemen in the front and two in the back, pointing their automatic rifles at us as if we were criminals. The curtains were pulled so that no one could see us and we couldn't see where we were going. After about three hours, my confessor Father Šepner collapsed. He fell on the floor, and they left him alone for an hour or two before we drove near a hospital and nurses took him out. We arrived in Bohosudov."