"I looked at it with much conflict. To this day, I don't know what the right opinion would be. It was conflicting in that, on the one hand, I was happy because I had hated the entire Marxism and socialism system all my life. But on the other hand, I had worked for it. I built housing estates, a university, the Palace of Culture, and the National Theatre. So, what was it all about? In the process, as I said earlier, I was forced to collaborate with the StB, so later I alternated between hope and fear. I remember to this day that I had moments when I was very scared, coming to Wenceslas Square and watching the demonstrations and rallies. But I think, I still believe I did nothing wrong. In fact, I did some lasting things. I mean, the University of Life Sciences is beautiful, the Milín housing estate is still upright, the Červený vrch estate is upright, and the Palace of Culture is upright. All of those projects have a life of their own, so why should I be ashamed of having built them? With that said, that stuff was problematic, but I must admit that nobody ever accused me of that."
"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."
A Jesuit and a PTP soldier turned the Prague Congress Centre site manager
Josef Šnejdar was born in Věteřov near Kyjov on 19 April 1926 into a poor and religious family of a small farmer with two siblings. At age eleven, his parents sent him to Velehrad to study at the monastic Pontifical College of the Society of Jesus [the Jesuit Order]. When the Nazi Germans took the school during the occupation, he entered a two-year Jesuit novitiate, then continued his studies at the Philosophical Institute of the Society of Jesus in Brno where he studied neo-Scholastic philosophy. Then, as a member of the Jesuit Order, he worked as an educator at the Bishop‘s Grammar School in Brno. In 1950 he was interned in Bohosudov as part of the unlawful communist Project K aiming to eliminate monasteries and male religious orders. Following six months of internment, he had to enlist in the PTP [Auxiliary Technical Battalions]. He worked in construction and was released from the military in 1953. Because of his politically unacceptable cadre profile at the time, he faced problems finding a job, and was banned from further studies for political reasons. The secret police (StB) contacted him as a former member of the Jesuit order in 1956, and following threats and blackmailing, he signed in for collaboration. He was hired by Keramos as a planner in the mid-1950s and went on to join Průmstav where he worked his way up the ranks to become the site manager of the Milín housing estate. Then he was put in charge of another high-profile project - the construction of a science campus in Suchdol. During these years (1960-1965) he studied civil engineering in Prague. The StB terminated cooperation with him in 1965. In 1979, he took over the management of the difficult Prague Congress Centre project (known as the Palace of Culture at the time), which he managed to complete on time. In 1981 he was entrusted with the reconstruction of the National Theatre. While working on the Palace of Culture, he was offered honorary membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he refused, and was later awarded the Order of Labour by President Gustáv Husák for successful project completion. To him, accepting the award was a matter of satisfaction yet also of controversy, as he never approved of the regime. In the 1980s, he earned a ‚candidate of economic sciences‘ degree in sectoral and cross-sectional economics and was later appointed associate professor of economics and construction management. He diverged from the Roman Catholic Church in the 1950s following his release from the PTP, maintaining a philosophical and intuitively mystical relationship with religion. He married and raised an adopted daughter with his wife. He served as a Deputy Minister from 1991 until the the Ministry of Building and Construction was restructured. In the 1990s, he and his associates privatised the Prague plant of the Pozemní stavby České Budějovice construction business, forming Českomoravská stavební s. r. o. of which he was the chairman. He and his wife moved to Volyně in 2007. He lived the final years of his life in Písek in the Světlo home for the elderly. He died in Písek on 28 July 2021.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!