“When I was imprisoned in Pankrác, one of my schoolmates who was in the adjacent cell was knocking on the wall using the Morse code to say that the investigators were criminals protected by the state. If they had heard him, he would have gotten into trouble. But it was noisy there, and the knocking was not overheard. We communicated this way, because the Morse code had been carved by a nail on every door in the Pankrác prison. I learnt it and we then used it to communicate.”
“It was worse when the Germans were retreating. They assembled the whole village and they claimed that somebody had deliberately spilled nails on the road, and that if nobody admitted to it, they would set five houses on fire. Obviously, nobody admitted to anything, because it was not true. As soon as they were done, they immediately set five houses on fire; they had already picked them beforehand. People were just allowed to take out cattle and take some small things, but they were watching over them. It happened right in Šumice.”
“It was in the house of some old lady who used to have a workroom there with her husband some time ago. I was ordained in that former workroom. I came in and there were already two other candidates. We only shook hand but we didn’t introduce ourselves by name so that we would not compromise each other. A couple of hours later the ordination rite began. What was required was only the book of rites, oil, and chalice. Bishop Trochta was living away from Prague, but he would for instance go to see a doctor in Prague and during these trips he would always stop by these people, and thus he knew this family. So it had been agreed to take place in their house. I don’t know their name. I only had to introduce myself using a certain password, which she knew, and then she opened the door for me.”
“I got to work in the stencil workshop, where I spent about two years. The work there was good and there was not so much factory noise. It was a separate workshop. Then there was voting whether Russians should start with atomic explosions. Obviously, I did not raise my hand and some women informed upon me. They immediately reported me to the party committee that I was a provocateur and what not, and I was immediately sent back to the factory.”
P. Josef Freml was born March 11, 1928 in Šumice near Uherský Brod. During the war he apprenticed in a shoe-making workshop in Zlín. That was when he first encountered the Roman Catholic Salesian Order thanks to his friends. In 1945 he decided to apply for study at the Salesian grammar school in Fryšták. He subsequently continued at the advanced Salesian grammar school in Přestavlky near Přerov. In April 1950 he experienced the operation Akce K there - forced closing down of monasteries and men‘s Catholic Orders. Josef Freml refused to study at the state-controlled general seminary. He completed his grammar school studies in Litovel instead and then he graduated from the Pedagogical Faculty in Olomouc. At the same time he maintained contacts with the Salesians and he secretly studied theology. In 1956 he was arrested and together with nine other Salesians sentenced in staged trial Polák and Co. to eighteen months of imprisonment for disrupting state control over churches. He was held in detention pending trial in prisons in Olomouc and Prague-Pankrác. In the beginning of December 1957 he was released in presidential amnesty. He has remained faithful to his beliefs and in 1965 he was secretly ordained a priest by bishop Štěpán Trochta. His first official celebratory mass, the First Mass, which he served secretly in July 1969 in his native Šumice, was attended by hundreds of people. During the normalization era he had problems with officials for church affairs and he was often forced to relocate. Several times he was at risk of having his pastoral licence cancelled. Died in 2014.
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