“He was a beautiful man, and he was out-going, and we loved him in the class where he taught us religious instructions. He was my teacher, twelve years older than I was. When I was fifteen and started family school, he moved to Strakonice, where he was arrested for reading the so-called Pastoral Letter. The Bolsheviks already knew that the priests had received it and when they were to read it. My husband said - I stepped up into the pulpit, I could already see the men waiting along the sides. He was twenty-seven, he was full of righteousness, the Bolsheviks had it in for Catholic priests, and so when he read it, they took him in straight away.”
“His attitude to the Church - he was hurt the most by the fact that when they locked him up, the Church did nothing for him, didn’t help, didn’t fight for them, not one bit. [Q: And did they have the means to, when the everyone in the Church was persecuted?] They weren’t all persecuted, they just kept in line with their mouth shut, they weren’t all persecuted. When my husband came back from prison, the Kralupy priest told him: ‘I guess you didn’t do much, if they released you by amnesty.’ [My husband] also said they’d even celebrated Mass in secret in prison. I don’t know why he turned so bitter to the Church. He wasn’t inside a church those whole twenty-two years, not even to have a look when I went. He preferred to wait outside. Our children weren’t baptised. Fasting was out of the questions. He said he’d laboured enough for all those years, that God didn’t even want that from him.”
“They also beat them, of course. And they had six beds placed together, where twelve people slept, and when one turned over, all the others had to as well. The only drink they had was water from the toilet flusher, nothing else. And when I saw the TV series Zdivočelá země [Country Gone Wild - trans.], where one prisoner says to the other, ‘I hid you a banana,’ well that’s not according to the truth at all. My husband didn’t even see half an apple the whole of his sentence. There was no chance. It was cruel. [Q: Did he write to you?] No. Because he didn’t behave well, he was forbidden everything. Parcels, visits... [Q: In what way did he not behave well?] Say, they didn’t give them any meat to eat for two weeks, and then on Good Friday, when the priests were fasting, they gave them hamburgers. Not that the priests would have minded so much, that it would have been such a sin, but they refused to eat the meat, out of spite. And that meant trouble. They were put in the cooler, in solitary confinement, as punishment for not eating the meat.”
Jana Vacíková, née Pencová, was born on 26 August 1933 into the working-class family of plumber Čeněk Penc and Jana Pencová in Veltrusy near Kralupy nad Vltavou. She a brother one year her elder and later a sister twenty years younger. They lived with her grandmother, who ran a small shop that kept the family afloat in times of need. She experienced hunger during the First Republic period and the bombing of Kralupy and Veltrusy during the war. She remembers the liberation and the Soviet soldiers, who lived in their house from May to autumn 1945. After the war her father joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and also began a business. When the Communist confiscated his enterprise after the February coup in 1948, he quit the party. In 1960 the witness started a relationship with the twelve-year-older Catholic priest Josef Vacík, who had just been released from prison by amnesty. He had served eleven of the allotted fifteen years for reading a forbidden pastoral letter on Corpus Christi, 19 June 1949 - thus voicing his opposition to the idea that the Church should be subjugated by the state. After his release he was bitter of the Church, and he never set foot in a church again. Jana Vacíková began living with him against her parents‘ wishes, and they remained unmarried until their first son was two years old. They lived in the fear that Josef could be locked up again at any moment, as he had a ten-year probationary period. His weakened health, ruined by the uranium mines, gave him a short life. He died from lung cancer in 1983. The family was under State Security surveillance until 1989, although Josef Vacík had been rehabilitated. Her children had problems getting accepted to schools. Jana Vacíková died on 26th July 2022.
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