"At that time, the capitular vicar came to Hustopeče, where we had our deanery meeting, and the capitular asked me, 'We are going to publish a new catalog. Do you want to be listed as a Dominican?' I said, 'Yes, everyone knows that about me.' So I appeared in the catalog as a Dominican, and then, not long after, a neighbor of mine came to see me. He lived two houses away from the rectory and was a very nice man. But he held some kind of captain position with the police, with the SNB. He came to me and said, 'Could you come to Mikulov to the police station on such and such a date?' I said, 'What's going on?' 'Comrades from Brno want to talk to you,' so it was clear to me. So I went there, and of course they asked me who had accepted me into the order and when and where, what had happened and why, and whether we met, and so on, other things like that. So we already had various pre-arranged answers. So basically – no one alive had admitted me, they were all dead, of course, and so on. So they didn't find out much. ‘And do you see each other? ’ I said, well, look, when I'm going somewhere to run an errand and I pass by the rectory where my colleague is, I stop by. Well, they wrote that down, importantly. Then, right after the interrogation, I went to see the provost and told him everything. 'You were too open, you said too much, you didn't have to.'"
"Before the revolution, the church secretary invited me to Břeclavsko. Near Mikulov was the pilgrimage site of Loreta. We went there every year to hear confessions because a lot of people came there. So he said to me, 'If you want to hear confessions, then without your robe.' Well, okay. So I spoke to the provost of Mikulov, who was an excellent gentleman. I told him, 'The church secretary threatened me like this.' I said, 'Provost, to tell you the truth, I don't even know where my cassock is. What would happen if I just went to hear confessions in an alb? A white alb.' He said, 'Well, that's a solution, yes.' So I went to Svatý kopeček in my alb and heard confessions. And as I was sitting there in the confessional, suddenly there was a rustling sound in front of the confessional, so I looked out and saw the church secretary coming to see how I was dressed. When he saw me in white, he shook his head sadly and left. So I told the provost about it, and he laughed and said, 'If he wants to be a church secretary, he should study what church clothing is.' And that was the end of it. Then it was already 1990."
"Our parents refused, my father categorically refused to join the agricultural cooperative. As a result, my sister couldn't get into any school, she was the younger sister, and my brother couldn't get into any school either. My sister worked in agriculture, my brother too. Then surveyors came to the village, measuring fields and I don't know what else, and my brother got to know them and then walked around the fields with those poles and helped them. One of the surveyors offered to help him get into a school in Brno if he wanted to. My brother was very good at drawing and sketching, so he collected some drawings and rushed to the train with a large folder, but somehow got tangled up and fell under the train. So he died. It was a very critical situation for us. So my father gave up and they both joined the cooperative farm."
Augustin Jiří Prokop was born on December 27, 1952, in Brno into a Catholic family. His mother, Jarmila, née Kvardová (1912), came from Ostrovačice near Brno. His father, Josef Prokop (1910), was born in Kněževes near Žďár nad Sázavou into a poor family. He had six brothers. All of them trained in a trade, the father as a blacksmith. After the war, Josef’s family moved to Vojkovice, in the former Sudetenland, and took over a farm from displaced Germans. Here they faced pressure to join the unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). His older brother František died tragically under the wheels of a train. Under the weight of this event, his father finally joined the cooperative. At school, the witness experienced discrimination and bullying against himself and his classmates who attended religious education classes. After gaining experience working at an institute in Velehrad and successfully completing his secondary education, he decided to secretly join the Dominican Order and took the religious name Augustin. He studied theology in Litoměřice and, during his studies, completed two years of military service with the railway troops in Ostrava and Bohumín. After returning from military service, he completed his studies at the Faculty of Theology and was ordained a priest in Brno. He served as a chaplain in Jihlava, Jemnice, Třebíč, and Perná, as well as a novice master. After agreeing to the publication of his affiliation with the Dominicans in the Catalogue of Clergy, he was interrogated by the Brno State Security in Mikulov, but the interrogation ended without consequences. In 1989, he served as prior in Olomouc and began to devote himself to archival work and the history of the Dominican Order. He also served as prior in Prague and Plzeň. He then left for missions in Lithuania and Estonia, and upon his return, he led the novitiate in Jablonné v Podještědí. In his old age, he served as chaplain in Uherský Brod at the Dominican monastery and in the monastery church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. At the time of filming (October 2025), Father Augustin Jiří Prokop lived and served in Uherský Brod.
