“As it was step by step loosening towards 1989, a comrade invited me to his office, he did not even offer me a seat and offered me to work as a head of liquidations. And that he had heard that I go to church and that I would have to stop. I am not playing the hero, but I told him that I would not stop, I turned back and that was it. It was not until about half a year before the revolution that the pressures were subsiding and a colleague from Pardubice came to see me and offered me the position of head of the sales department. I asked him if it was okay that I went to church, and he said that it was no longer a problem.”
“It was at the time when we practised for Spartakiade. I got in trouble with my favourite class teacher Jirka Doležel because I just missed the Spartakiade practice. He naturally scolded me for it. And I could not tell him that it was because I had served at the Feast of Corpus Christi at Vraclav church. One simply did not mention it. It was just the fact that you said something at home and something else at school, work and among people. You had to be careful even in the pub.”
“The First Mass of Jiří Paďour could not take place in Vraclav because comrades did not want it. He had it in Prague in the Church of Our Lady before Týn in Old Town Square and I and my wife attended it. It was of course very uplifting and touching. It was my duty with his older brother Váša to offer the sign of peace to other people on behalf of the newly ordered priest Jiří. That is why we walked around the church and then suddenly I shook hands with some men who were standing in niches, and they did not understand what it was about. That is why I think that they were State Security agents who had been ordered to oversee the ceremony.”
He was born on 23 May 1950 to parents František Novák and Marie Nováková who spent their whole lives as farmers in the East Bohemian village of Vraclav. Ladislav Novák also stayed faithful to the village and especially a local parish. Since childhood, he watched the destruction of private agriculture and the gradual suppression of popular religion and local religious traditions by the communist regime. He cared mainly about the destiny of the future bishop of České Budějovice Jiří Paďour and his family. Having finished elementary school, he was not allowed to study at secondary school but had to attend a vocational school. In 1968, he and his friend were accidentally brought back from their holiday travels in the GDR by a vehicle of the Warsaw Pact Troops that occupied Czechoslovakia two days later. He refused to give up his faith even during normalization even though it prevented him from advancing in his career. Although an engineer of economics, he stagnated for more than ten years as a clerk. It was even more difficult to raise his children in faith due to self-censorship. After the revolution, he had to deal with the dismissal and demotion of his nomenklatura colleagues in his new, leading position. After the war in Ukraine started, he and his wife Věra arranged accommodation for several Ukrainian families. They kept helping the families in 2023 and they still lived in Vraclav.
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!
