Meet the Daring Slovak Nun Who Defied the Communists

I ’d had to request the book through interlibrary loan, and it came to me, in all its tattered glory, with pages itching to fall out and a threatening sticker posted on the front, warning me about the dreadful fine I’d incur if I failed to return said book. What book could be the cause of so much effort?

William Brinkley’s The Deliverance of Sister Cecilia.

If this unassuming black book even caught your eye, the title might entice you to take a closer look. Who is this Sister Cecilia? What angry Mother Abbess, overly cheerful fellow nuns, or grouchy sacristan could she need deliverance from? And how interesting could a book about a nun really be?

Some might find life in a convent dull or tedious, but not Sister Cecilia. All she wants is to be back safely in just such a place, and to be teaching her beloved kindergarten classes again. For this brave sister is on the run, crisscrossing Czechoslovakia as she tries to stay one step ahead of the communist forces who pursue her.

Written as a first-person narrative, this true story was told by Sister Cecilia to journalist William Brinkley and published first in Life magazine in 1954. A fuller version of her account was then published as a book and even became the basis of a 1955 movie starring Claudette Colbert. From there, however, Sister’s thrilling life story seems to have fallen into obscurity. I’ve run in homeschool literary circles long enough to be familiar with quite a number of excellent reads lost to the mainstream, but I’m still being surprised by new-to-me titles all the time. Thanks to a post by Emily Malloy over on the Theology of Home Substack, my interest in Sister Cecilia’s life was piqued, and I eagerly tracked down the book. It languished in my overflowing library book basket for a few weeks, but once I started reading, it was difficult to stop.

The book, which is broken into five parts, begins in media res, with a scene where Sister, disguised in a blue polka-dot dress, flees her convent, evading the communists. From there, Sister takes readers back to her childhood, regaling us with hilarious stories of her life on a farm with loving parents and many siblings. She was always managing to get into some kind of trouble or cause a scene, and she continually pokes fun at herself and wonders how God ended up choosing her to become a nun.

This glimpse into both Sister’s early life and the workings of a rural Slovakian farm is beautiful and telling. It shows a strong, simple faith, a love of family, and a pride in one’s land. These realities and sentiments are all the more striking when juxtaposed with the Communist Party’s takeover later in the book, and show in a very small way some of what was lost.

The book’s prose is clear and straightforward, full of amusing, poignant, and terrifying moments. You don’t ever get the sense that Sister is trying to sound impressive or embellish anything that she did or experienced. This is the story of a woman who simply loved being a nun, who delighted in teaching children, and who was firmly dedicated to the vocation to which she’d been called. She was resourceful and quick to laugh (though much of the laughing stopped after the communists came). She had a deep devotion to Saint Joseph and credits him for his help throughout her life. (Even when she was escaping, despite being told to carry nothing that could compromise her, she clung to her holy card of Saint Joseph.)

What had she done that required her to flee for her life? She aided the escape of some priests from behind the Iron Curtain and was trying to help more get out when she was discovered. That she escaped at all is truly a miracle, and through that escape, she brought with her the stories of many brave people. Since the book was published in the 1950s, Sister didn’t mention the last names or often even the true first names of those she encountered out of fear for their safety. We learn about heroic priests, feisty old women, and daring scouts. They are the ones who brought strength and comfort and safety to their suffering countrymen, and whose courage in the face of so devious and wicked an enemy was truly astounding.

More than anything else, this story drove home for me the vileness and insidiousness of the communists. Sister Cecilia describes the takeover of her land in distressing detail, and her vantage point as both a religious sister and a teacher makes it all the more chilling.

After the Communist Party seized power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, it began a relentless, ruthless elimination of religion and religious teachers in schools, followed by the closure of Catholic schools. Sister Cecilia also details the work brigades that even very young children were required to join — and which were of course held on Sundays — as well as the occupation and secularization of her beloved convent. These, and many other oppressive measures, were imposed on Sister Cecilia and her fellow religious teachers and were resisted as long and as cleverly as possible. One of the book’s best scenes, in my opinion, is when Sister Cecilia faces down the party member charged with “observing” her classroom and refuses to take down the religious images on the walls. It is a mighty battle of wills and a striking summation of communist thought and action.

But while we seethe at the communists, we are emboldened by the tales of resistance. Anicka. Margita. Orsula and Ludo. Valera and Hanko. Father Jano. Big and Little Jo Jo. These and many others will be introduced to you by Sister Cecilia. Often, their end is either unhappy or unknown, but she brings them to us in her own special way. She doesn’t question the providence of God, which brought her out safely from Slovakia. Perhaps it was not only so that we could know the horrors of communism in no uncertain terms, but so that we could hear the stories of selfless men and women who would otherwise go unknown. Through Sister, the actions of these good people who fought back against this sinister tide of evil will not be forgotten.