My brother won out the right to choose his own fate
Bohuslav Eliáš was born in 1931 in Pardubice as the third son of Vladimír and Anna Eliáš. His father was an officer of the Czechoslovak army in reserve; in 1935 he started his own brick factory in Chvojenec. However, the economic crisis forced him to move to Pardubice and take a job as a civil servant. His son Petr was born that same year. Vladimír Eliáš was in the resistance movement, but he was never discovered. He died at the very end of the war, on 8 May 1945, in a clash between demonstrating Czechs and a German armoured car. His widowed wife took their five sons and moved to her brother’s house in Liberec. When the latter emigrated to Colombia in 1948, the family got in trouble. Bohuslav’s brother Petr was not allowed to study theology, and so he earned a degree at the Czech Technical University in Prague instead; his jobs included working in Otto Wichterle’s team. In the end Petr escaped to Italy and entered the seminary; he was ordained into priesthood in 1971. He was posted in Switzerland and served as the pastor of his expatriates in Australia for fifteen years. He returned to his homeland after the revolution and helped establish the Diocese of Pilsen. With this work done and Mons. Radkovský chosen as Bishop of Pilsen, a completely exhausted Petr Eliáš died of a heart attack. Bohuslav Eliáš still lives in Liberec.
