My name is Brother Ladislaw and many years ago when I was still young, God said to me “Come, follow Me”. I answered, “Yes, Lord, but what will become of my parents? “Do not concern yourself”, he answered. “I will take care of them. Follow me.”

                During the years of Nazism, I was imprisoned in a forced labor camp where airplanes were built. That was where I got to know the Fatebenefratelli. And so, when the war ended, I knocked on their door in Prague and was welcomed by the Brothers and brought into the religious life. But above all, they taught me how to take care of the elderly, sick and needy people they cared for in the new and modern Prague hospital.

                To work in the hospital, of course, I had to go to nursing school. After I received my degree, I worked primarily in the operating theatre where I generally took care of the instruments or, sometimes helped with anesthesia. Even though the work was difficult and time-consuming, I never forgot to visit the elderly patients who were hospitalized there.

However, this happy period was short-lived. In 1948, all the country’s hospitals were nationalized and we monks were barred from working there as male nurses. Even worse, in 1960, we were forced to leave Prague and go wherever our communist rulers decided. I, together with several other Brothers, was sent to the Benedictine monastery in Broumov, an enormous building which then also housed a number of nuns. All of us were forced to work in a textile factory so that overnight I found myself repairing sewing machines. There must have been between 300 and 400 of us and we were under constant police surveillance.  Only in 1968, was I given permission to return to Brno and to our House. Finally, once again, I was able to care for the hospital’s elderly patients.

What I would like to say to today’s young people is that they mustn’t be afraid of the future. Whoever entrusts his life to Christ need not fear anything. I have been an optimist all my life, precisely because I knew that whatever my decisions, God would always be there to give support.

(In 2010, Fra Ladislaw was given the Celestyn Opitz award for his untiring commitment to the care of the needy. In 2013, he received another award for the reconstruction in Vizovice of the first postwar religious hospital in the Czech Republic.)