In this archival feature, we turn to a personal and revealing interview with Petr Oprsal. While much of this blog focuses on his fiction and translations, Petr’s life story – specifically his upbringing as a Jehovah’s Witness in Communist Czechoslovakia and his subsequent departure from the faith – is central to understanding his worldview.
The following excerpt, titled “Losing my religion,” chronicles the journey that eventually led Petr to write his memoir, Cestou Z Veze (“Flight from the Tower”). It touches on the clandestine nature of faith under communism, the intellectual curiosity that led to his “awakening,” and the painful reality of the shunning practices that followed.
It is a candid look at the price of intellectual freedom.
Losing my religion
Petr Oprsal knows one or two things about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ shunning practices. Born in Communist Czechoslovakia, Oprsal – whose mother was, and still is, a devout member – was raised and brought up among Jehovah’s Witnesses.
“For as long as I can remember, I have the memory of these secret gatherings in peoples’ flats. I never really liked all those congregations and activities, this fake, artificial singing, but always thought there wasn’t anything else,” he tells BIRN over the phone.
Oprsal, now in his 50s and working in Luxembourg for the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ), started having doubts early on, he says, sceptically listening to their apocalyptic prophecies and proclamations about the impending end of the world. He also devoured history books, theology theses and went back to the original holy texts to make out right from wrong.
A few years after the Velvet Revolution, once the Jehovah’s Witnesses had moved from the shadows of illegality to a fully recognised church in the new Czech Republic, Oprsal confronted the group’s elders with his doubts and findings, but did not feel heard. “They were completely blind,” he says. “I went through several committees, they tried to ‘bring me back to reason’, but I quickly understood that there was no way I could stay.”
For Oprsal, who went on to study law in the eastern Czech city of Olomouc before moving to Luxembourg in the early 2000s, the departure from the Jehovah’s Witness life was not as painful as it might have been for others. “Of course I was a bit sad of being shunned by people, of some members later not even greeting me in the streets, but I already had friends outside of the community, which isn’t the case for many Witnesses,” he tells BIRN.
He is still in contact with his mother, but relations have evidently been strained by their diverging social and theological paths. “I feel a bit sorry for her, as she also has to live with the stigma of me leaving the community,” he confides. “I would love to shake her up, but I don’t think that’s really an option at her age.”
She also told him she would never read the book Cestou Z Veze (“Flight from the Tower”) that he wrote about his experience with the sect.
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