Stanislav Pazderka

“They came for father on Saturday before the harvest feast. The fair is celebrated on 26th July and the harvest feast is held a week later. It is a great celebration when the family and friends gather and it lasts for three days. They came for him on Saturday in the afternoon and they took him to Hustopeče, then to Cejl in Brno and then they sent him to Kuřim to a factory which produced prefabricated panels. Once had him there, they made up an accusation that he had not fulfilled some of his obligations. And so they sent him to a new court trial and he was sentenced for another three months. He had to spent half a year in prison. He was no longer a young man. In 1957 he was already fifty-five years old. And he had a weak heart, and he died several years later as a consequence of it. It was not that he had problems with physical work. He endured that well. He was used to it. He only attended elementary school for five and a half years, because as his older brothers were being drafted to the army, he had to work on the farm. But he was a pensive man and he read Czech as well as foreign literature a lot. It rather hurt his mind, because there were not only political prisoners, but also crooks and slackers and he did not fell well among those people.”

“In 1946 my brother enrolled in the grammar school in Velehrad which was run by the Society of Jesus. When the school became closed down in 1950, he completed his grammar school studies in Břeclav. Afterward he did not want to go to study at the seminary in Litoměřice to become a priest and he became employed in the cooperative where he worked as a tile setter. When 1968 came, he had an opportunity to leave the country legally. He arranged it and he went to Austria where he later joined the Society of Jesus. He was working on his German for one year so that he would not have problems with is studies. One year later he began studying at the Jesuit university in Innsbruck, and he graduated from theology. When he was ordained in 1974, he sent his parents an invitation to Austria for his first mass. Obviously, our parents did not get a permission to travel there but some colleagues from Brno were there. My brother then went to London and he was going to Vienna and he invited our parents there again. It only became possible after the death of our father, and so mom then went there with her sister. When he invited his mom again the following year, she was so happy that she collapsed. She suffered a stroke. Mom was then taken to the hospital in Hustopeče.”

“We were lucky that the ceiling and attic were wooden. We found two or three kilogram bombs with a small propeller in one room which opened into the street. As they pierced the ceiling they fell onto the floor and they partly broke through the planks and remained stuck there. Larger bombs, about five to seven kilograms, dropped into the second room. There was a wooden floor and ceiling as well. There was a layer of dirt under the floor, and the bomb dropped in there. They only discovered a hole and so they covered it with dirt. Then some five or seven years later, new floors were being made and the bomb was found there. My father was a hero and he took it away and he reported it to the village administration office. Thank God that it did not explode. If it had exploded, the house would have been quite devastated.”