Cardinal Czerny: My family
during World War II
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| Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ. |
In a Vatican News exclusive, Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ,
the Under-Secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for
Promoting Integral Human Development, recounts the experience of his family
during the Second World War.
By Vatican News
In an interview with Johanna Bronkova of Vatican News,
Cardinal Michael Czerny talks about the dramatic experiences of his family in
(then) Czechoslovakia: their Jewish background, their faith, his mother’s internment
in a Nazi concentration camp, the war, and their flight to Canada. Among his
memories, Cardinal Czerny recalls his grandmother’s painting, on glass, of the
“Flight into Egypt” — an image that was reproduced for the commemorative cards
distributed on the day of his creation as Cardinal.
Text of the interview with Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ:
Cardinal Michael Czerny: My parents rarely spoke
about their family’s wartime experiences, for several reasons: the memories
were painful; they wanted to avoid misinterpretations of their family history;
and they preferred to focus on making a new life in Canada.
However, for this interview, I am happy to fill in some
details of interest in the country of my birth, the then Czechoslovakia before
relocating to Canada in 1948, and about my grandmother who painted the “Flight
into Egypt” image which now commemorates my becoming Cardinal.
Question: What was your parents’ experience or
involvement during World War II?
MC: My parents lived in Moravia. My mother,
Winifred Hayek Czerny, experienced prison and concentration camp for a total of
twenty months during World War II. She was also required to work as a farm
labourer. Although born and raised Roman Catholic by Roman Catholic parents,
her grandparents were born Jewish and she was classified as Jewish by the Nazi
authorities who ruled the so-called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from
March 1939 onwards.
My father, Egon Czerny, was also Roman Catholic; not having
Jewish lineage, he was spared concentration camp; he was put in the forced
labour camp at Postoloprty for the last eight months of the War, due to his
refusal to divorce my mother, while she was interned at Terezín.
Q: Why was your mother imprisoned as well as
being put in a concentration camp?
MC: The Nazi authorities demanded that everyone
whom they classified as Jewish surrender valuables to them. It was discovered
that my mother had withheld some family jewellery. She was tried and convicted
for theft from the state and served a one-year sentence in a women’s prison in
Leipzig.
Q: What was your mother’s attitude to being a
Holocaust survivor?
MC: My mother did not think of herself in these
terms because “Holocaust” is properly attributed to the Jewish community, while
she identified as Catholic. Her attitude was that she was fortunate to survive
the murderous insanity of a regime that had no legitimate grounds for
persecuting and executing anyone merely because of their background.
My mother returned to Terezín in April 1995, and in the
guest book of its museum, wrote “I survived.” She indeed survived a monstrous
evil that took human beings, each one a unique person, and rendered them
anonymous, first coercively reducing them to numbers and then by gas and fire
that turned them into ash, into dust. In her art, my mother reversed that evil.
Out of “dust” or clay, she sculpted the likeness of many living human persons,
likenesses that will last far, far beyond the normal span of years because,
ironically, they have been “fired” in a kiln. Our family donated three of her
portrait sculptures, including one of myself, to the Terezín museum.
Michael Czerny receives the cardinalatial biretta from Pope Francis
Q: You have reproduced a “Flight into Egypt”
painting by your grandmother, Anna Hayek. Please tell us about her.
MC: As well as a wife and the mother of three
children, Anna Löw Hayek was a gifted sportswoman and amateur artist. Her
surviving artistic output consists of two dozen watercolours and pages of
pencil sketches, plus the folk-style “Flight into Egypt” painting on glass which
was reproduced for my card.
Cardinal Czerny's memorial card
She was born in 1893. Both she and her husband Hans were
Roman Catholic from birth but were classified as Jewish due to their Jewish
forebears. With her husband and two sons Karl Robert and Georg, she was
transported to the Terezín concentration camp in 1942 or 1943. She died in
Auschwitz a few weeks after the war ended; the other three perished earlier.
Q: So then tell us a bit about your family’s
move to Canada.
MC: I was born in Brno in July 1946, and my
brother Robert in May 1948. That same year, our family fled. The first of many
challenges was to get out, and we had to find a place to go. Our parents made
many inquiries. They learned that Canada would let us in if we could find
someone in Canada to sponsor us. First, a relative was willing but then
withdrew the offer. Then a businessman said yes, he could hire my father, but
changed his mind when his factory burned down.
Finally, with our family in ever-increasing danger, a
high-school classmate of my parents sponsored us. He had himself immigrated to
Canada only a few years before with his own wife and young son. The risk of
sponsoring included having to support us for a year if my father could not find
work. Nevertheless, this family helped us to enter the country, welcomed us and
guided us through the very puzzling process of getting around a new city before
learning to speak a new language, how to behave before grasping a different
culture, earning a living, finally crossing the ethnic barriers and making
friends… yet still continuing to live in the languages and cultures we brought
with us.
In Canada, our family lived in a French-speaking
neighbourhood for two years and then moved elsewhere in Montreal and finally,
in 1953, to the English-speaking suburb of Pointe Claire (at that time called
Lakeside). So already speaking Czech, I next learned French and then English,
which is now my ‘first’ language.
Q: Did you have any relationship with
Czechoslovakia or Czech Republic later on?
MC: As an adult, I returned to Czechoslovakia
from mid-October 1987 to mid-January 1988. I wanted to explore the land of my
birth and have some first-hand experience of life under communism. In Brno I
met several times with the Jesuit provincial P. Jan Pavlik, who lived in his
mother’s house and had his “office” there. In Prague I often visited P. Karel
Dománek, who lived very discreetly in the building where he had worked for many
years as the janitor. I also visited P. František Lízna in Velké Opatovice and
we concelebrated the Eucharist at the little altar in his mother’s house.
I returned for a few weeks in April 1989, visiting both P.
Pavlik and the Slovak provincial P. Andrej Osvald in Važec, where he was parish
priest and also ministered to the Rom.
In all of these encounters, I was impressed by the courage
and faith of those who kept the flame of Christian faith burning and the
sanctuary of Church life open throughout the Communist years.
No one guessed that a huge change was only a few months
away! And since then, I have been in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for
meetings of the Jesuit Social Apostolate in Central/Eastern Europe, one at the
Jesuit residence of the Kostel svatého Ignáce in Prague in January 1996 and
another at the Exercičný dom sv. Ignáca in Prešov in November 1998.
Q: Please explain your coat of arms as a Cardinal.
MC: Since January 2017, I am one of the two
Undersecretaries of the Vatican Section for Migrants and Refugees. To reflect
this ministry as well as my own life experience, my coat of arms shows a boat
carrying a family of four – refugees and other people “on the move” often go by
boat. In fact, our family of four came by boat to Canada in 1948, so the water
below the boat reminds me of the Atlantic Ocean. The boat is also a traditional
image of the Church as the Bark of Peter, which has a mandate from Our Lord to
"Receive the foreigner" (Matthew 25:35), regardless of where the
Church finds herself. Further, like the symbol of the L’Arche movement, the
boat is a reminder of the works of mercy towards all who are excluded,
forgotten or disadvantaged. The gold sunburst above the boat is the seal of the
Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. And the green background is a reminder of Pope
Francis's encyclical Laudato si’ which calls upon all of us to
care for the well-being of Creation, our common home.
Cardinal Czerny's Coat of Arms
Q: And your motto?
MC: My motto is “Suscipe”, the first word and
title of the prayer which St Ignatius places in the final contemplation of
the Spiritual Exercises, namely, the Contemplation to
Attain the Love of God. So with the one word “Suscipe”, I mean to evoke the
whole prayer of giving oneself totally to God as the spirituality of being a
Cardinal. In his letter to the new Cardinals of October 2019, the Pope
explained what this really means: “The Church asks of you a new form of
service… a summons to greater self-sacrifice and a consistent witness of life.”
And the scarlet robes represent the shedding of blood – usque ad
effusionem sanguinis – in total loyalty and fidelity to Christ.
Q: Your pectoral cross is made of wood. Can you
tell us about it?
MC: My pectoral cross was made by the Italian
artist Domenico
Pellegrino. He took the wood from the remains of a boat used by migrants
to cross the Mediterranean from Northern Africa in their attempt to reach the
Italian island of Lampedusa.
The material suggests the wood of the cross on which Jesus
was crucified, the Son of God, “to take away the sins of the world”. The
original nail clearly reminds us Jesus was nailed to the Cross; the Jesuit coat
of arms includes the traditional three nails. The poor wood suggests the Jesuit
vow of poverty and the desire for a humble, engaged Church. The origin of the
wood reflects my family's flight to safety when I was very young as well as my
current responsibilities in the Migrants and Refugees Section.
Cardinal Czerny's Pectoral Cross
The cracks in the red paint and the wood are reminders of
the wounds, the suffering, the blood spilled in the Crucifixion and when the
world forgets compassion and justice, while the lighter colour in the upper
portion suggests the Resurrection of our Lord and Saviour, r and the fullness
of life which He came to bring.
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18.XI.2019
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