For a long time, I couldn‘t forgive myself for not letting my sister study
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Vojtěch Suchý was born on March 11, 1948 in Brno into a deeply religious family. He lived with his mother Antonia, father Antonín and younger sister Helena in Rosice u Brna. Father was a lawyer at the United Farmers Union and mother was a clerk at the tax office. The family lived together with a grandmother, whose house was destroyed during World War II. Father became a candidate of the Communist Party after the war. In 1949, when his comrades wanted him to join the party, he sent them a sharp letter of refusal. It is with this letter that the witness associates his father‘s stay in detention for about six months in 1956. After returning from prison, father quit his job because he did not want to see the forced collectivization of agriculture. He then worked as a lawyer in an engineering company. He graduated from high school, then from the Faculty of Theology in Litoměřice, which he completed in 1971. However, his younger sister Helena, a first-year student, did not get to study because of his ministry in the church, and he blamed himself for many years. In 1973 he was ordained a priest. By that time he knew he wanted to join the Jesuits. He was received into it, secretly and in a private apartment, by the provincial, Father Jan Pavlik. The communist regime sentenced him to 10 years for treason in 1956 and he went through the uranium mines in Jáchymov and the prisons in Leopoldov and Mírov. Vojtěch Suchý worked as a parish priest in several parishes, in Dačice or Nové Město na Moravě, and had to deal with the surveillance of State Security and the mockery of the church district secretary under communism. After the Velvet Revolution he worked as a teacher at the reopened Bishop‘s Grammar School in Brno. In 1998, he became a provincial of the Society of Jesus and improved his language skills in Italy. He held this office until 2004. He completed his Jesuit tertiate in Innsbruck. He also served as Master of Novices in Ruzomberok for six years. Since 2011, he has served as the Spiritual of the Christian Primary School of Nativity in Děčín, as the administrator of the parish in Benešov nad Ploučnicí and as the District Vicar of the Vicariate of Děčín. In 2018, he was rector of the Jesuit Church in Brno and in 2022 he returned to the Nativity School in Děčín and took over the administration of the Benešov parish. In 2024, the witness lived in Děčín.
