“Christians were quite normal, which was surprising for me at that time, because I didn’t know anything about them… They helped me at that time. They were lending me books. I even found it strange that a Jesuit could lend me David Wilkerson’s book ‘The Cross and the Switchblade.’ Father Hron then told me: ‘I wanted to know what you would think about it and what it would do with you.’”
“A priest should give a bit of hope and some outlook to the future to people. Not only at times when we are doing fine, but also in the mess we get ourselves into. For example, my patients. What matter to me, for instance, is that they are not jumping out of the window to kill themselves.”
“The poem Drizzle: ‘It is drizzling. A priest in a surplice celebrates the mass. In this weather-worn church you will not hear the roar of beasts. Outside, rain is drizzling in puddles. You will not see heaven in a puddle today. In the weather-worn church, love is drizzling into souls.’ I got the idea for this poem a long time ago when we were returning from some tramping trip. It was on Easter. On Great Friday we came to the Catholic church in Žlutice. A young priest was celebrating the mass alone, there was nobody else in the church. We entered, three tramps, and he told us: ‘You have saved the Easter for me.’ He celebrated the mass although he was alone. That happened during the communist regime.”
“Dad told me that one evening a man with a beard knocked on his window and introduced himself as Julius Fučík. He had allegedly learnt that father was in the Committee for the Assistance to Democratic Spain and that he was without any means. He told him that the communists were distributing their cash reserves when everything was now lost, and – although dad never had anything to do with communists – that he thus brought him five thousand Crowns. If I tell things like that to other people they think I am crazy. But Fučík really did arrive to see my dad in Chroustovice. He then came one more time, just for a chat.”
“I decided that I would take another direction in my life because I was actually quite content with working in the factory. And then there was the Velvet Revolution in 1989. In spring 1990 we were repairing the fasade on a church in Pardubice, and a car stopped down there. Bishop Tuček got out of the car and he called at me, just like Jesus called at Zacchaeus: ‘Václav, get down, if you want to minister in the church, tell me now!’ I agreed immediately. There was no time for praying about it… And so I began serving in the church again.”
“My friend Jakub Zahradník – the son of conductor Václav Zahradník – composed music to my poem “Question marks.’ I met him in Příchovice. We have been going to the Catholic parsonage there already for twenty-seven years. We meet there every year with the other writers of a so-called group Skupina XXVI. All of a sudden, Jakub called me and asked me if I would permit him to compose music to some of my poems. Two weeks ago I went to the concert. It was held in the Convent of St. Agnes and Hurník was the host. I realized how vainglorious I was, because I was actually quite pleased by it.”
Václav Žďárský was born November 26, 1951 in Vrchlabí. Václav’s father served as a pastor of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church and his mother Marie worked in the school system. In mid-1930s Václav Žďárský Sr. was involved in the Society of Friends of Democratic Spain and he was a member of its council. He knew a number of important personalities of our country, such as A. Pražák, J. Skupa, or J. L. Hromádka. At the time of the Nazi occupation, Julius Fučík visited him in Chroustovice two times. Václav spent his childhood near the railway station in Česká Třebová. After the completion of his secondary school studies he was not admitted to the arts academy, and he thus took a temporary job in the chemical factory VCHZ Synthesia Semtín. He eventually spent twenty-two years in this factory as a worker and operation chemist. He recorded his memories of that time in his book titled ‘Chemical plant, my love.’ Since the mid-1980s he served as a lay preacher and later as a pastor of the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. He wrote several collections of poems and he plays the organ. He is a member of the literary group Skupina XXVI.
