Josef Hladiš

* 1932

  • “After we came to Bohosudov, there was this first roundup and all the big shots came, they were all State Security and all. And, of course, they gave us this long lecture about how there was going to be prosperity from now on, how great it was all going to be, how awesome it was all going to be. And that they're just going to make sure that there's prosperity. And that there's going to be this wonderful communist paradise. After all that propaganda, and it was literally just propaganda.. But of course, we were twenty-year-old boys at that time, we knew very well that it was just a farce, that the communists were mere invaders who took power in Czechoslovakia. All the forty people who were brought there, the young people. We were, the young people, we were separated from the older ones, and of course they wanted us to decide in the very first days whether we wanted to go into civilian life, into employment or to study, they stated that the party and the government would fix everything for us. And, of course, to their surprise, as the Communists thought it would be easy, and that they would scare us boys, me and the rest of the boys, that we would all join some of their institutions. But of our forty people, none of us applied, none of us wanted to leave the monastery to join some state enterprise or a school or an institution or an educational institution. No one applied, no one at all. They were furious that the Jesuits were controlling the youth, but it was due to the education. We had the most important thing there was, our good God and Lord and Jesus Christ and all that religious matter and of course that kept us going. And we had to endure it all."

  • "And there, all those people, we all came to Bohosudov like half-prisoners of sorts. Because the first thing that those bosses, who were mostly in plain clothes... The people in charge were obviously State Security. They were all StB. Of course, there were uniformed policemen and uniformed gendarmes as well, they went around with their guns, with machine guns and they would watch over us. It was a kind of surveillance, you could say. But the bosses were in plain clothes, the StB men. They were educating, or training us, so to speak, dressed in civilian clothes. And of course they told us their theories and we just had to laugh. Because they were mostly poorly educated people, just makeshift experts, who were supposed to understand politics and the economy and the state and I don't know what. And now they just wanted to tell us something. And sometimes we just had to laugh at how ridiculous it was. But we couldn't do anything because our freedom of movement was restricted."

  • "1950. That was the thirteenth, fourteenth of April. When all those the monasteries were disbanded by the state, they were all dissolved. And all those monks, they were just centralized, so to speak, in these large centers, and the superiors were separated, so as not to corrupt the younger members of the order. And, of course, the superiors were kept in Želiv in southern Bohemia, and after the 13th of April we were moved from Velehrad to Bohosudov. That was a former Jesuit gymnasium, German though. But after the Czechs took over, it was just Czech. But that was during the transition."

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    Velehrad, 13.07.2022

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    délka: 01:37:26
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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They turned us into half-prisoners, yet they kept telling us that communism was a paradise like no other

Josef Hladiš in 2022
Josef Hladiš in 2022
zdroj: Post Bellum

Josef Hladiš was born on 11 February 1932 in Nivnice into a peasant family of Maria and Josef Hladiš. In 1945 he started to study at a Jesuit Gymnasium (grammar school) in Velehrad. Four years later, after the school was was closed, he entered the novitiate. On the night of April 13, as a part of the Operation K, he was interned in Bohosudov and later in Hájek near Prague, and finally in Klíčava, where he participated in the construction of a dam. The purpose of this internment was an ideological re-education. In 1953-1955 he performed military service, unlike other former novices he did not join the PTP. After the war, he lived in Ostrava and continued to associate with the Jesuits. In 1959, as a part of the trial against Jesuit priest Antonín Zgarbík and other members of the order, he was accused of subverting the republic. He was sentenced to 5 years in prison, loss of civil rights and property, but was released on amnesty in May 1960. In 1968 he returned to his priestly studies at the Roman Catholic Cyril and Methodius Divinity School in Litoměřice. In 1971 he was ordained a priest. He began his priestly career as a chaplain in Kroměříž. After a bold Christmas sermon, he was transferred to Prostějov. After the fall of the communist regime, in 1990-1996, he worked as a priest in Velehrad, where he participated in the preparation of the visit of Pope John Paul II. Since 2013 he has been a member of the local Jesuit community.