The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945–1990

Vojtech Jenčík (1920–1976)

cZEcHosloVaKia | 173 Vojtech Jenčík (1920–1976) A student at the Sts. Cyril and Methodius Theological Faculty in Bratislava, he was consecrated as a priest in 1945 in the famous Concathedral of St. Martin in Bratislava. The following seven years he served in the Košice diocese. On 14 September 1950 he defended his dissertation on pastoral workers, which was based on the social encyclicals Rerum novarum of Pope Leo XIII and the Quadregesimo anno of Pope Pius XI. In 1952 he was briefly interned in the so-called centralized monastery in Mučenici where the Security Police came to arrest him. Two years later, the Supreme Court in Prague charged Jenčik, together with a group of activist priests, with alleged treason and spying and sentenced him to sixteen years in prison. He was released according to the terms of the amnesty of 9 May 1960, but by then he had come to know firsthand the insides of Valdice , Rytně v Podkrkonoši,19 Mírov, and Jáchymov. Under strict observation by the State Security, Jenčik worked as a laborer in the Trebisov (Slovakia) sugar processing factory and on a dairy farm in Mihalovce, in the Košice district. He was able to return to pastoral service only after the events of 1968. He died in 1976. The following excerpt is from the collection Život a dielo kňaza ThDr. Vojtecha Jenčíka (The Life and Work of Fr. Th.Dr. Vojtech Jenčíka, 2006), published by the Department of Theology of the Copernicus University in Ružomberk and reprinted in Básnici za mrežami (Prešov: Vydavatel’stvo Michala Vaška, 2009), 72–74. It has been translated from Slovak by Harold B. Segel. A bolo treba íst’ (tebe i Vam) (I Had to Go [to Thee and Thou]) . . . It was time to go and so I walked forward. I a dark-haired boy of stormy temperament and I didn’t stand long at a crossroads. The labyrinth of all roads Led me into a single road and I had to go, and so like a boy my age I set out along the road of all roads, that connects all roads. The common denominator of roads of conquering discoveries of scholars, a miner, a king . . . 174 | cZEcHosloVaKia and so I had to go, I am a priest, and that is all that I can say. As a boy I never thought much about the battles of the world, when I wrote poems in fertile Zemplín field,20 my knees burrowed to mottled furrows with grandfather’s sweat and ported bees from flower to flower, let them drink the heady drink of life from glasses, let them feel the generosity of God, let them feel, as the life of all of us from field to field existence joins in unity, that many, that everything, that we are all in God. And so I had to go and tell that to the world, that the world has many names and that one alone is true. Well, I am a priest, and I speak, I speak, summon, cry out, that it is beautiful to live, that life is deep. It was always clear to me, and still is now, that my greatness is when I stand before God, and Divine Infinity saturates my existence. For His love I ran off with the leap of a lion and offered myself. . . . One always has to go and get drunk on God’s blood, let my meagerness disappear in His depths. Radiant, full of plans: this eternal calling to be a human being. In this divine challenge to understand the necessity to travel the steep path of existence. There is value in life, not in sentiment, that oozes away, life only accompanies, in life value has its source, life gives only taste to happiness that otherwise lacks it. Happiness is the delight of life, which lost the connection with the First Life— which is not the same (oh, that is little) but lives for all eternity from God’s existence. And so I had to go, and left, behold, I am the prophet of Life and stand as Your delegate before our God. cZEcHosloVaKia | 175 The center of a turbulent priestly heart holds the whole universe (I bear it heavily, for on this center the stress of eternity presses) in the cruel pain of love, eternity and...