Mgr. Václav Hurt

* 1957

  • “I remember the interrogation well. The offer of collaboration was somewhere in the background. But it was probably not the main issue. They rather tried to scare me. The greatest number of interrogations that I experienced was in my first parish in Merklín in western Bohemia. As for my schoolmates, it varied. One of them was a friend of his. I could not understand this. Then I even refused an invitation to some class reunion because he was there and because I did not trust him He thought that if he told them something about me, he would trick them and he would then be able to have some positive influence on them. Well, that was very naïve. Most of my schoolmates told me about it if they had been contacted. Some of them were invited to a pub, some of them just passed through. Like my good friend Pavel Ruml, whom they had not contacted at all during his studies. But they attempted to put him to prison while he was doing his military service and they nearly succeeded. Some counter-intelligence officer was after him and he accused him and Pavel was tried. So there were efforts like that.”

  • “The first interrogation came about three days after I had moved there. They took me to Stod and the offer was clear. ‘Vicar, you have just moved here and you certainly do not wish to move again soon, and we do have the authority to make decisions in this matter. It would be therefore advisable if we were on good terms. For start, if you could tell us, for instance, who goes to church on Sundays. We know it anyway.’ If I had said it to them and signed, they would have been able to blackmail me the next time and threaten that they would tell it to the people that I had informed upon them to the police. I had been refusing any form of cooperation from the beginning and I had them rewrite some portions or I told them that I would not sign them. So we eventually found a way to get along with one another. They were eventually sending me notices and I was going to the police station in Stod. I talked with them. I tried to talk about general things, about nature, and mountains, rivers, and they always turned the conversation so that they would get some names from me. I think that they were not too successful. It lasted for about a year during which I had about one interrogation a month. Then during the second year, they turned their attention to people who were going to the vicarage and they stopped interrogating me. There was a kind of a trend; one time they took about twenty young people for interrogations. Some girls were fifteen years old. A Volha car arrived and took them from their homes to Pilsen, in most cases. They even underwent five-hour long interrogation sessions where they were completely alone.”

  • “We went from Albertov to Vyšehrad where it was supposed to finish. The we walked back. I actually walked all the way. I had to return home, because in Hrabová we had agreed on taking down the scaffolding on Saturday so that we would be able to finish the construction of the roof. I left Národní Street immediately before the attack. I was in the first rows and we were sitting on the ground for about half an hour or an hour. Policemen were standing against us. I was a bit ashamed for that. They allowed me to enter Mikulandská Street. I think that they didn’t let in anybody else. Then they closed the street and they stormed at the people. I went home by the last train and when I arrived home I turned on the Radio Free Europe and I found out what had happened.”

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    Litomyšl, 27.04.2018

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    duration: 03:19:47
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Nearly everyone of us students at the faculty of theology has been contacted by the StB

Václav Hurt as a young man
Václav Hurt as a young man
photo: archiv pamětníka

Václav Hurt was born on May 11, 1957 in Čáslav, but he spent his childhood in the mountain hamlet Hořejší Herlíkovice in the Krkonoše Mountains where his parents worked as administrators of a leisure resort ran by the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren. In 1976-1981 he studied at the Komenský Evangelical Faculty of Theology. During his studies he married Ursula Weissová and they gradually had four children. After his first placement as a pastor in Merklín he tried to organize various meetings and thus to foster a sense of community among young evangelical believers. As a consequence, he was being regularly summoned to interrogations by the StB and eventually in 1985 the authorities annulled his permission to serve as a pastor. For several months he then worked as worker in a bakery and in a brickworks before he was sent to the other end of the country, to Hrabová, where he was able to serve the believers again. However, he was not deterred by the pressure and he continued meeting people who were actively struggling against the communist regime. Václav was among the participants of the protest rally in Národní Street in Prague which took place on November 17, 1989 and which marked the fall of the communist regime. Together with other people he then established the Civic Forum in Hrabová and he served as an evangelical pastor there until 1999. Subsequently he served in Bošín, then again in Mladá Boleslav and from 2012 he serves in Litomyšl. As an army chaplain he also took part in the SFOR II mission in Bosnia at the turn of the millennium and for several years he and his wife have been devoting their time to foster care for abandoned babies in order to prevent them from developing problems stemming from their stay in an institutional care facility.