In the 1980s, this house was a headquarters for printing and distributing Christian samizdat—underground literature forbidden by the communist regime. Šimulčik, now in his fifties, was part of the movement as a college student. A Catholic priest posing as a worker lived in secret in the house back then. Šimulčik and a handful of other Catholic students would come there at planned intervals to sort and package samizdat documents for distribution.
Šimulčik leads me down a crumbling concrete staircase into a basement. It is plain, damp, and a bit chilly, like every other basement in the world. What is his point? I wonder.
Then the scholar removes a floor panel that had entirely escaped my notice. There is a hole in the basement floor big enough for a man to climb through, and iron rungs embedded in the concrete wall. Šimulčik turns around backward and descends into the hole, signaling for me to follow.
At the bottom there is a short tunnel. Crouching to make my way through the cramped space, I follow Šimulčik up the iron rungs in the exit shaft. We emerge into a tiny room, not much bigger than a closet. There is a table against the wall, upon which sits an offset printing machine of 1980 vintage.
In this secret room, underneath the house and behind a secret basement wall, accessible only by hidden tunnel, dissident Christians printed Gospels, prayer books, and catechism lessons for clandestine distribution throughout communist Slovakia. The printer was a gift to the Catholics from Evangelical Christians in the Netherlands, who smuggled it into the country in pieces and sent a second team to reassemble it in the underground room.
After communism fell in 1989, the operation ended and the undercover priest moved out of the house. But subsequent owners have maintained the secret room as a reminder of what it took to save the faith under the totalitarian yoke.
“There was a man at my university who worked as an elevator repairman,” Šimulčik tells me as we stand in the room, our heads almost touching the ceiling. “His hands were often stained. I thought it was from the grease and the grime of repairing elevators, but it was actually from the ink he used to print samizdat. His job was the perfect cover.”
As a student, Šimulčik knew that the elevator repairman had something to do with the Christian underground, but he wasn’t sure what. That was by design. The underground only shared information like that on a need-to-know basis, so those arrested by the secret police couldn’t compromise the operations if they broke under interrogation. What Šimulčik did not learn until communism fell was that for all those years he was upstairs in that house compiling samizdat, that elevator repairman was down below, spending hours in the tomblike room, printing the words of life at great risk to his own liberty.
In fact, everyone involved with the Christian samizdat project would have been sent to prison had the secret police ever discovered the network. As Šimulčik breaks down for me the complex moving parts of the operation, he emphasizes the extraordinary risks the underground Christians took for the sake of publishing these documents. Why did you get involved? I ask. You could have lost everything.
“When you ask that question, you are really asking about where we find the meaning of the underground church,” Šimulčik replies. “It was in small community. Only in small communities could people feel free.”
He goes on:
When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom. You knew that when you went outside, there was totalitarianism. It controlled everything and oppressed you. People like me who wanted knowledge and freedom, and wanted to know more about our faith, depended on these small communities. They were well organized, and we had strong leaders. This was the only place to find that. First, I did it because I wanted to experience personal freedom, but this was connected to Christ. After we tasted freedom in these communities, we gradually came to want to fight for freedom for everyone.
Šimulčik tells me that he and his cell of several other young Catholic men were all afraid. You would have been crazy not to have fear.
“The question is, which is going to win: fear, or courage?” he says. “In the beginning, it was mostly a matter of fear. But once you started experiencing freedom—and you felt it, you felt freedom through the things you did—your courage grew. We experienced all this together. We helped one another to gradually build up the courage to do bigger things, like join the Candle Demonstration.”
“With this courage also developed our sense of duty, and our need to be of service to other people,” the historian continues. “We could see the products of our work. We could hold these samizdat books in our hands, and we could see that people really read them and learned from them. We saw what we did as service to God and service to people. But it took years for us to see the fruit of our labor and to see our communities grow.”
Small Communities Can Rescue the Lone Individual
František Mikloško, now in his seventies, was a central leader of the second wave of the Slovak underground church. When we meet for lunch in a Bratislava restaurant, he is quick to offer advice to the current generation of Christians, who, in his view, are facing a very different kind of challenge than he did at their age.
“When I talk to young people today, I tell them that they have it harder than we did in one way: it is harder to tell who is the enemy. I tell them that what is crucial is to stay true to yourself, true to your
