Josef Přelouček

* 1962

  • “First I wanted to be a priest, I even played pretend at home. I had a little table and put a tablecloth on it and other things. But later on when I was in seventh or eighth class I came to the realisation that I might become a teacher, because I wanted to go to the pedagogical secondary school. However, on the train they stole my bag with all my documents and papers, so I stayed in Orșova for my 9th and 10th years. There I had time to think about it and of course the parish priest from Orșova played a big role. I served as an altar boy there every Sunday and was always in contact with him and so I subsequently went to the priest seminary. I remember once he told me […]: ‘If you go to the priest seminary, one day you’ll be a kind of pillar for the Czechs.’ That surprised me and I almost laughed it off. Maybe even today it’s rather laughable, because I’m no pillar for anyone. I’m just this small person, ordinary like everyone else.”

  • “When I came to Bígr, I celebrated my First Holy Mass there, my prima missa. When I finished I went to a family for a short lunch. The man from that family, it struck me later, not initially, he asked me a lot of questions and had this notebook where he would make notes every time. Later that I found it strange and so I rather didn’t talk any more. That was still 1988, about a year and a half before the revolution. So I didn’t say anything else at that person´s house, because I always saw him taking his notebook and making notes. And indeed. After 1989 I discovered that he had really cooperated [with State Security] and was an informer, he’d been handing that information over.”

  • “We had a teacher, he was Romanian, he wasn’t from the village – Old Jan. When we were going to church on Sunday morning, he lived next to the church, he had a house there, and he was standing outside watching who was going to church. He was such an ardent communist. So we knew that the next day, on Monday, when we would arrive to school, we would always be tested, [the children] he saw going to church. We always had to stand up and say what we’d learnt. It was a kind of intimidation to stop us going to church, but it didn’t last and we kept going. Sometimes there were all kinds of events on Sunday morning, organized by the school, but that was just to keep us from Sunday Mass.”

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    Svatá Helena, Rumunsko, 20.10.2021

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As long as the last Czech remains here, I will remain as well

Josef Přelouček in 2021
Josef Přelouček in 2021
photo: Memory of Nations

Josef Přelouček was born on 20 March 1962 in Eibentál (Eibenthal), a Czech village in Romanian Banat. His father František worked as a miner in the anthracite mines in the neighbouring village of Nové Doly (Baia Nouă in Romanian), As a result of the harsh working conditions he became ill and died at the age of 44 of lung disease - silicosis. At the time the witness was only four years old and grew up on a small farm alongside his three-years-younger brother Václav, together with their mother Kateřina. In Eibentál he completed eight years of school, where teaching was exclusively in Romanian. His childhood wish was to become a priest and he was an altar boy at the local church consecrated to St. John of Nepomuk. After eight school years he continued studying another two years in Orșova (Oršava) and later completed the preparatory priest’s seminary in the town of Alba Iulia. After successful secondary school graduation he studied at the theological faculty, completing those studies in 1988. In Eibentál, on 26 June that year he celebrated his First Mass. Between the years 1988–2003 he worked in the parish of Moldova Nouă (Nová Moldava), he was suspended for a short period for refusing to transfer to Gerník and subsequently served as a Roman Catholic priest near the Hungarian border. After replacement of the diocesan bishop, from 2018 he returned to Gerník, whose parish also includes Bígr (Bigăr), Rovensko (Ravensca) and the mixed-nationality Berzasca (Berszászka) and Lubková (Liubcova). At the time of recording he was living with his mother in Gerník (2021).