These are the slides and text of the talk I gave at the Silvester Krčméry centenary conference organised by the Slovak National Institute for Memory in Trnava, Slovakia on 24 June 2024.
Introduction
Thank you very much for this opportunity to speak with you at this important conference honouring the memory of Silvester Krčméry – Silvo as he was known to the leaders of the JOC Internationale in Brussels.
I am the grandson of another Stefan Gigacz, from Sumiac in the shadow of Kralova Hola, who became a fireman or stoker on steam trains and so gradually moved to Brezno, then Zvolen and finally Bratislava. His son, Ján Gigacz, my father, studied chemistry at the Bratislava Polytechnic, was imprisoned in a labour camp before escaping and finally arriving in Australia as an International Refugee Organisation (IRO)-sponsored refugee in 1951.
Thirty years later on my first visits to Bratislava in 1981 in 1983, my cousins, Vladimír and Dusan Havrilla, introduced me to their friends in the dissident and artistic community of that time, including Ján Budaj, who was then working as a stoker heating buildings, and Tomáš Petřivý, who died mysteriously just a few years later in 1986.
Actually, the reason for those trips to Europe in those years was to take part in international conferences of the Young Christian Workers or Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC). Sadly, I had no idea that there had once been a JOC in Slovakia and that Silvo Krčméry and other Slovak jocists were still living then, as was the amazing Fr Tomislav Kolakovič. Indeed, the more I learn about them, the greater is my regret that I never had the opportunity to meet them.
In this humble talk, I will simply share with you some of the things I have learned about their work in the development of the JOC in Czechoslovakia, and particularly Slovakia. My sources are the archives of the JOC Internationale (JOCI)1 and Marguerite Fiévez2, a key international leader of the developing JOCI from 1945-57,3 as well as from an autobiography of “Father George,” a pseudonym for Fr Kolakovič, ghostwritten by Gretta Palmer and published in the USA in 1949 under the title “God’s Underground.”4
The Young Christian Workers
Perhaps, it’s important in this context to say a few words about the origins of the JOC, which was first launched by the Belgian priest, Joseph Cardijn. Born in 1882, Cardijn grew up in the town of Halle, where he witnessed the problems of teenage young workers at the nearby factories. When his own father, a coal store owner died of overwork in 1903, he vowed to devote his life and his priesthood to saving young workers and the emerging working class.5
His first practical opportunity to implement this vow came with his appointment to the parish of Notre Dame at Laeken, near Brussels at Easter 1912. Within a year, he had launched a vast network of social projects for the mainly working class women of the parish. In addition, he had recruited and trained a team of educated young women in their twenties, who would become counsellors or mentors to the “study circles” of teenage female factory workers that he also started.
These study circles, which were largely modelled on those that had been developed over the previous two decades by the French democratic movement, Le Sillon,6 founded by Marc Sangnier, taught those teenage workers to make systematic enquiries into the conditions and problems that faced them in their daily work in the factories, and to take small scale personal actions as well as larger scale collective actions to improve their lot. In this way, they discovered their personal dignity as well as their own mission or – lay apostolate – at work, at home and in the community.
By 1925, this study circle method had started to become known as the “see-judge-act,” later incorporated in Catholic Social Teaching by John XXIII in his 1961 encyclical, Mater et Magistra, and into the teaching of the Second Vatican Council.
Meanwhile, by 1919, those original study circles at Laeken had blossomed into a movement, first known as La Jeunesse Syndicaliste or Young Trade Unionists, which took the name Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne in 1924, and gained approval from Pope Pius XI in 1925.
This enabled the movement to spread quickly to France by 1927 with a first international congress taking place in August 1935. By September 1939, it had already reached 50 countries, including several in Central Europe, including Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia.
Introducing Fr Stjepan Tomislav Poglajen a.k.a. Tomislav Kolakovič
Indeed, it is a JOC document entitled “La JOC dans le monde” published in 1939 that we first find reference to a Croatian Jesuit named Fr Stjepan Tomislav Poglajen7.
“Fr Poglajen is a devotee of the JOC,” the text reads. “It was he who founded the Croatian JOC in Zagreb and enabled it to spread throughout Croatia.”
It was this Fr Poglajen, whom we meet again several years later in Slovakia, where – not doubt for security reasons – he now adopted the name “Tomislav Kolakovič.” Here again, in the middle of World War II, he immediately began to involve himself in the development of the JOC, as he explained in God’s Underground.
“In Croatia, Slovenia, and now here in Slovakia I found myself rejoicing in the presence of many clear-eyed men and women who belonged to the world-wide movement known as Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne,” he explained.8
Here he credited the French jocists, who, he said, had “showed our Balkan youth the way to meet the Nazi invader long before Hitler turned east.”
“Disciplined, dedicated and energetic, the Jocists are no pious psalm-singing group,” he wrote. “They have always fought for social justice on any unpopular front they found, and their faith flowered into works of a practical nature.
“They consistently opposed all racial discrimination and fought every political movement which would subordinate the rights of the individual to the interests of the state.”
Thus, no French Jocist “accepted a factory job that might hasten a Nazi victory,” Fr Kolakovič said.
The beginnings of the Slovak JOC
Such was the jocist ethos that so clearly inspired Fr Kolakovič in his work with Slovak young workers, who also faced many dangers. “Our own Jocists had hairbreadth escapes in those days of study in Bratislava,” he recalled.9
Given the circumstances of Slovakia at that time, “we could do pitifully little,” he lamented. “But we remembered the traditional Jocist motto: ‘See. Judge. Act’.” he explained the work as follows:
Seeing was all too easy. We were seeing the horrors modern war unleashes on a civilian population… Yes, there was much for us to “see.” “Judging” was our main preoccupation. It was to judge wisely that we held those anxious secret meetings where we pencilled our copies of the Pope’s Encyclicals and hammered out our duty as Christians in an anti-Christian world. But how to “act”? That was more difficult.
I remember one secret meeting attended by a visiting bishop. During an air raid and we led him to a shelter where a small group might be fairly safe… Under cover of the sound of sirens and crashing bombs we softly sang, “Veni, veni, Creator, veni.” Then we gathered at the bishop’s feet to plan, with his guidance, our work for the next few arduous months.
“Resist, of course,” he told us. “Refuse, no matter what the offered reward might be, to collaborate with the evil which the Nazis represent. But nowadays you can do much more than that. You can act.” Perched on the dusty bins, we listened to this bishop who was seated on an upturned wine barrel. “You have a courage in the face of death which men lack if they do not know that there is an after-life,” he said. “You, therefore, must always be the ones to venture first when dangerous work is to be done. You must organise your own squads to rescue the wounded from spots where the city’s teams might hesitate to go… You must, especially, take on yourselves a work of mercy for which no provision has been made…”
This was the program of action which our movement carried out throughout those dangerous days. Born in the new catacombs and blessed by our kindly bishop, it saved us from the futile, wasteful hatred and fear which exhausts the emotion of so many victims of mass bombings.10
Such were the origins of the JOC in Slovakia. What’s more, as Fr Kolakovič also recorded, there were indeed young French JOC leaders with them. Under Nazi occupation, many French young workers had been forced to take part in “Service du travail obligatoire” (STO) or “Compulsory labour service,” which meant they were sent to Germany, Austria and even Slovakia to work in military factories.
Jean Boyer, was one of these young workers, who had found himself in Bratislava in July 1944. Following the model of other French jocists, as he wrote in a noted preserved in the JOCI archives, he immediately set out to launch study circles among his fellow workers, successfully 20 militants and forming two study circles within six weeks of his arrival.11
By the start of September, as he came under suspicion, he had fled to the countryside, where he joined the partisans in the Slovak National Uprising.
Along this path, he had also encountered Fr Kolakovič, whom he later described as having “lived a remarkable life of Christian holiness and missionary apostolate.” Indeed, Boyer also quotes a Slovak Jewish woman, who said of him: “Truly, I would never have believed that Christians like Prof Kolakovič existed.”
The post-war development of the movement
Once the war was over, Fr Kolakovič and his lay colleagues took further steps to develop the Slovak JOC. The archives of the JOCI contain few details of this but enough to indicate that many efforts were under way, not just in Slovakia but also in Bohemia and Moravia. Thus, for example, we learn in a note dated 29 November 1945 that Prince Jean Lobkowicz had translated the Manuel de la JOC12 into Czech!
Meanwhile, Fr Kolakovič had left the Jesuit order over a disagreement euphemistically described as concerning his understanding of the apostolate – perhaps no surprise given the role of another Jesuit, Jozef Tiso, who had served as president of the Slovak state during the war.
True to his Fatima-inspired desire to convert Russia, he had travelled there and prepared a report for the Vatican. This led to him being accused by the Czechoslovak government of spying for the Vatican. Soon after, in March 1946, he was accused of, tortured and imprisoned for allegedly leading a plot against the government.
As Fr Kolakovič wrote in God’s Underground, “our Catholic Action students and workers had a record of near martyrdom in their opposition to the Nazis: nobody knew this fact better than the Communists who had worked with us and even entrusted their live to us in the joint underground in the late years of the war.”13
“But now the Communist program had changed,” he explained. “Now it was the Catholics who had become their hated enemy. Now it was the Christian workers and students who most clearly opposed their plan to make Czecho-Slovakia another Soviet state.” Indeed, among those he met in prison, Fr Kolakovič mentions a jocist leader whose name he gives simply as “Stefan.”
Regarding these events, a note in the JOCI archives citing the Benedictine priest, Fr Anastáz Opasek OSB, indicates that the charges were unfounded but were aimed to remove him from the scene prior to the national elections that took place on 26 May 1946. Fr Opasek further advised that there was nothing that the JOCI could do to obtain his freedom. Similarly, Prince Lobkowicz advised the JOCI to refrain from action for fear of inflaming matters.
None of this Communist deterred the blossoming of the jocist movement, however. Following the elections, Fr Kolakovič, who later recorded that he had been tortured albeit mildly compared to others,14 was eventually released and he wrote to Cardijn on 13 August 1946, informing him that the Slovak JOC was developing well with “an authentic jocist spirit,” and that he was also helping prepare JOC pioneers for Bohemia. In this context, he also spoke highly of a young Slovak Catholic Action leader, František Buzek, who was about to visit Belgium.
This growth in the JOC across Czechoslovakia was also evidenced in the holding of the First National Congress of the movement, as well as in a series of publications that began to appear. However, problems also began to emerge. Some of the JOC study circles in Bohemia tended to be more intellectual, while others were more rural and thus belonged more appropriately to a rural movement such as the JAC, the rural version of the JOC.
In Moravia, a dynamic Dominican priest, Fr Metoděj Habáň, had launched a new jocist-inspired movement called the “Nová Pracujíci Mládež” of NPM, i.e. “New Young Workers” rather than Young Christian Workers. Moreover, it sought to be a combined movement of students and workers, rejecting the specialisation approach of the JOC. Finally, it was clear that the Slovak JOC was the most authentic of the Czechoslovak movements.
The JOCI secretariat were aware of these issues, as the correspondence of Marguerite Fiévez illustrates. With Cardijn constantly travelling, she had taken on the role of the main correspondent with the chaplains and leaders from Czechoslovakia.
Given the emerging problems, however, Cardijn also began to plan a visit to Czechoslovakia, which eventually took place in April 1947, another sensitive period for the country, corresponding with the hanging of Fr Tiso.
Once again, we find Fr Kolakovič advising Cardijn on the most important issues to address during his visit, including the importance of the situation of working youth, the need to emphasise that specialisation did not breach Church unity, and the imperative need for priests to be formed as chaplains. He also insisted on the need for a Slovak movement separate from the movement in Bohemia, with its own national secretariat, and its own direct relationship with the JOCI.
It is during the preparation for Cardijn’s visit that we first find reference to Silvo Krčméry, who had apparently also travelled to Belgium in April 1947 for a JOC training program.15 Based on this experience, Krčméry also advised that the difference between the Slovaks and Czechs was even greater than that between the Flemish and the Walloons in Belgium, where each group had its own separate national JOC movement.
In an insight into the importance of the role that Fr Kolakovič played in the development of the Slovak movement, Krčméry later wrote that “I noticed that Abbé Cardijn asked the professor about everything and acted according to his opinions and instructions.”
Moreover, Cardijn himself had explicitly praised Fr Kolakovič’s role, commenting that he was “too modest when he says that he was only a collaborator; he was more than that, he was a co-founder of the Jocist movement.”
Following Cardijn’s visit, Fr Kolakovič disappears from the JOCI archives. However, the problems that had been identified did not go away. Correspondence between Fiévez and movement leaders and chaplains indicates that it still faced difficulties in several dioceses from bishops as well as from the national secretariat of Catholic Action, just as had happened in Belgium 20 years earlier. Thus, we find Fiévez insisting in her letters on the need for a specialised young workers movement led by young workers, not students, and also on the need for a genuine JOC to be recognised by the JOCI.
Meanwhile, Krčméry, who had gone to Prague to study medicine had now switched to social work. From this period, despite the demands of his studies, he appears to have become a privileged correspondent with Fiévez and with the JOCI secretariat regarding developments in Czechoslovakia.
The aftermath of the 1948 coup
Following the coup d’état in February 1948, however, difficulties soon began to emerge for the JOC. One letter to the JOCI secretariat reports that leaders in a factory where jocist leaders had organised were all compelled to join the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the jocist leaders wished to continue their commitment.
And the situation continued to deteriorate. On 19 July 1949, a French JOCF leader, A. Lacroix contacted the JOCI secretariat to report that she had received a message that the jocist leader, Botek, had been imprisoned, and that Silvo Krčméry was in danger of being imprisoned.
This is the last item in the archives of the JOCI on the status of the JOC in Slovakia and Czechoslovakia. Not until after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 did Marguerite Fiévez eventually learn of the fate of Silvo and other JOC leaders.
Reunion 1992
“Last December I was able to reconnect with Czechoslovak Christians, thanks to the impromptu visit of my old friend, Silvester Krčmery,” Fiévez wrote in 199216.
“He was part of a delegation from the Slovak Parliament that came to Belgium to learn about the process followed in our country to achieve federalisation…
“I had not seen Silvo since 1948. So, I learned in hindsight that he had been imprisoned for sixteen years for his militant Christian action. During this period he had lost his father and mother and a number of his friends whom he never saw again. And he found himself at 60, without even the joy of being able to start a family.
“Through our conversations, I came to understand that the Church in Czechoslovakia will have to develop a new identity. After years of silence and serious internal tensions for or against clandestinity – it has found itself free and eager to flourish again.”
Nor was Silvo Krčméry the only jocist leader or chaplain imprisoned. Among the names mentioned in the JOCI archives are František Buzek, jailed for 15 years, Fr Alois Pekárek, three years, and the Benedictine Anastaz Opasek, life imprisonment. No doubt there were others too like the “Stefan” mentioned by Fr Kolakovič.
We give thanks for their commitment and their sacrifices. And I am so glad to discover their stories.
Stefan Gigacz
Notes
1KADOC, Leuven, Belgium: https://kadoc.kuleuven.be/english
2CARHOP, Braine-le-Comte, Belgium: www.carhop.be
3Stefan Gigacz, From the Belgian JOC to the Pontifical Council of the Laity, Awaiting publication. See also: https://fievez.josephcardijn.com/
4Father George as told to Gretta Palmer, God’s Underground, Appleton-Century-Crots, New York, 1949: https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-BGY-648/page/n5/mode/2up
5Joseph Cardijn Digital Library: https://www.josephcardijn.com/en/cardijn-life
6Stefan Gigacz, Le Sillon and the YCW, Towards an understanding of the origins of the IYCW, 1991: https://sillon.net/the-sillon-and-the-ycw/
7JOC, La JOC dans le monde, 1939: https://www.josephcardijn.com/fr/item/1128
8God’s Underground, 23.
9God’s Underground, 24.
10God’s Underground, 25.
11Archives JOCI, Box Czechoslovakia, KADOC, Leuven, Belgium.
12Two editions of the Manuel de la JOC were published, the first in 1925 and the second classical edition in 1930. See extracts here: https://www.josephcardijn.com/fr/item/2377
13God’s Underground, 199-200.
14God’s Underground, 207.
15Frévez to Krčméry: 4 March 1947: Archives JOCI.
16Marguerite Fiévez, Les inconnues de la Tchechoslovaquie libre, Archives Marguerite Fiévez, No. 12, CARHOP, Belgium.