Bohumil Kolář

* 1924

  • “I was tried as a member of a criminal gang of eleven. There were three priests: Me, Bradna and Pilík. Bradna got 15 years, Pilík 12 and I got 10 years in jail. There was physical punishment all the time during the detention. We were constantly starving. You lost a great portion of your weight. It happened that someone who had previously weighed 100 kilos only had 50 kilos after the detention period. This means that he lost half of his body weight in less than 9 months! We were also suffering from cold and halved rations when they were dissatisfied with our testimonies. That was quite usual. Besides that I personally didn’t experience any physical violence. I was a Mr. nobody for them. Absolutely unimportant. They didn’t expect me to tell them any marvelous state secrets or reveal long lists of names to them. But those who were considered to be important and to have the kind of information they wanted suffered terribly. From the stories I’ve been told by them I learned about the horrors they had to endure.”

  • “When I was behind bars, I met clerics from other churches as well. They weren’t as many as those from the Catholic Church because the regime apparently didn’t consider them to be such a risk to it. Additionally, they weren’t as numerous. So I met a few priests from the Czechoslovak Church, the Protestant Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists. The relationships with these people couldn’t have been better – we were true brothers. The adherence to various churches turned out to be no obstacle at all. This experience was one of the greatest gains I took away from jail. Friendships were formed very quickly with the newcomers. Almost every newcomer recognized some familiar faces of people whom he knew and who had been jailed. He also very quickly got to know new people. So there was a very friendly spirit among the clerics in the prison. The thing that contributed to it was the fact that the Communists put all the clerics together, no matter what church or position they had held previously. It could have been a bishop, a professor or a chaplain or even a student of Theology without a proper ordination. This created an inspiring and diverse environment with a friendly atmosphere. We were all brothers. We naturally called ourselves with our first names and talked about all kinds of things. On our own, we wouldn’t have been able to put together the kind of council the Communists organized for us.”

  • “My motto is identical with the one in our prayers on every Sunday. During my ordination I had printed images representing certain words that I come back to over and over again. They are the words from the third chapter, eleventh verse of the First Letter to the Corinthians: ´No one can lay a different fundament then the one that’s already been laid. That fundament is Jesus Christ.´ My experience – personal, family and global – confirms the truth that lies in these words again and again.”

  • “It happened like this. Father Bradna was arrested. He was my schoolmate from the time of my studies and he was serving in the neighboring parish – he was a chaplain. They arrested him but as they didn’t have any real evidence against him and this was still in the beginning when they didn’t have much experience in fabricating false evidence, yet. So after a few days they had to let him go home. He was, however, warned that the State police was waiting for him in the parish where he was serving. As he knew that they were gonna jail him he was trying to hide somewhere. Of course, I knew about this but I didn’t talk about it. The thing is that we knew some of the students that wanted to go study theology in Rome and therefore they tried to cross the border. In the first years this was still possible as the whole system of the border enclosures consisting of fences charged with electricity wasn’t finished, yet. Unfortunately one of these students met with a person who was a police decoy. This man then reported them to the police who arrested the whole group. One of these students had a letter from me with him and that’s how they came upon my name. So they came to my home and arrested me.”

  • “I returned to Czechoslovakia in July 1948. Altogether it was four of us who were coming home, two from the Prague dioceses and two from the Brno dioceses. I was ordained right at the time of the February coup d’état. I was ordained on February 21st and by that time things were already heating up in Prague. The coup itself followed on February 25th. That was when the Communists took over all the power. We knew very well what kind of government came to power in Czechoslovakia and that it bode ill for us. We were listening to the events on the radio so we were well informed about the situation at home. But there was no reason not to return. We felt that it was important to have people in Czechoslovakia who’d serve the church no matter how bad the situation got.”

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    Praha, 08.10.2008

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„On our own, we wouldn’t have been able to put together the kind of council the Communists organized for us“

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Bohumil Kolář

Bohumil Kolář was born on January 7, 1924, in Prague. He was the second child of Bohumil Kolář, the elder and Anastázie Kolářová. His father was a construction worker and his mother was in the household raising five children. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was eleven years old. He attended elementary and grammar school in Prague - Vinohrady. He graduated in the midst of the so-called „Heydrichiáda“ (a campaign of terror against the Czech population in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhart Heydrich by an airborne unit of the exterritorial Czechoslovak army). Bohumil decided early on in his life, in his childhood, that he‘d serve the church by becoming a clergyman. Therefore, he quite naturally chose to study Theology in 1942. He attended the archiepiscopal seminary in Prague - Břežany until the liberation of Czechoslovakia in 1945. After the liberation, Prague‘s Faculty of Theology was re-opened and the students of the archiepiscopal seminary could continue their studies at the Faculty. Bohumil Kolář was one of those few from the individual dioceses selected for advanced studies of Theology in Rome. He finished his studies in Rome in 1948 and was ordained right at the time of the February 1948 coup d‘état in Czechoslovakia. Although the post-February situation in Czechoslovakia wasn‘t good for the church, Bohumil didn‘t have any fears about coming back to the country and becoming a cleric. In July 1948, he returned as one of the last from Rome to Czechoslovakia and became a chaplain in Roudnice nad Labem. In June 1949, Bohumil Kolář was one of the many clerics who was not frightened by Communist pressure and read the pastoral letter entitled A Message to the People of Faith by Their Bishops and Ordinaries in the Hour of the Gravest Test. For his brave stand he had to suffer the consequences: he was interrogated by the secret state police and subsequently jailed. However, on October 28, 1949, he was pardoned. That was just the beginning. In the few years that followed, relations between the Communist regime and the Roman-Catholic church gradually deteriorated and culminated in the open persecution, arrests and imprisonment of priests and clerics in the early fifties. Some of the leading members of the clergy were even executed. Mr. Kolář was arrested on August 23, 1952. His detention and subsequent arrest in Brno lasted until June 1953, when the district court of justice in Ostrava finally announced his verdict. On trial was a group of eleven charged with high treason. Among them were three Roman-catholic priests: Antonín Bradna, Karel Pilík and our Bohumil Kolář. They were found guilty and sentenced to long terms in prison. Mr. Kolář was sentenced to 10 years of maximum security jail time. After the trial, Mr. Kolář was put in a prison in Mladá Boleslav where he spent several months working with mica. In November 1953, he was transferred to the infamous Valdice prison. He worked in several places around the prison, mostly in the Koh-i-Noor works and in the glass-grinding works. Life in prison meant constant harassment by the jail guards, cold and starvation. On the other hand, it also meant meeting inspiring people from all walks of life. He cherishes these encounters to this day. Friendships were being made not only with other catholic clerics but also with brothers from other churches and religions. Mr. Kolář was released from Valdice in May, 1960. He wasn‘t allowed to continue his clerical service, so he got a job as a warehouse employee. He worked in the warehouse until 1968 when the political relaxation after the Prague Spring enabled him to return as a parson to Roudnice nad Labem. Here he worked until 1991. In 1991, he got a job at the re-established Faculty of Theology where he taught Pedagogy and Catechism for several years. He was also working for the Prague seminary for five years in the first half of the nineties. In the present, Mr. Kolář still actively serves in two parishes near Prague.