I didn’t awaken to peril; I did it just because I was young and avid not only for adventure, but also for truth and justice
Tomáš Konc was born on August 24, 1963, in Bratislava in the family with six children. Under the influence of a good upbringing and thanks to the contacts with the Capuchin order, he was from his early childhood decided to dedicate his life to religious belief and later he chose to become a priest. The turn of events in his life came, when he started to smuggle forbidden religious literature from Poland to Czechoslovakia. In December 1983, when he was only a twenty-year-old student, the border guard caught him on the Polish borders along with his friends Branislav Borovský and Alojz Gabaj. He spent three months in Polish prison and was dismissed from studies at the Faculty of Mechanical engineering of the Slovak University of Technology. In March 1985 the court passed the prison sentence on him for „smuggling“ and he was serving his sentence in Bratislava prison from March to August 1986. After being released, Tomáš worked as a manual worker and managed to finish the compulsory military service. Then he was accepted to the Charles University in Prague where he started to study math and physics. At the same time he secretly studied theology and in 1994 he underwent the ceremony of ordination. During the period of totalitarian regime reprisals Tomáš Konc experienced not only cruel physical treatment, but also psychological terror and had to face its consequences also many years after being released from prison.