Fr. Richard Henkes, S.A.C., A Picture of His Life A Picture of His Life | Page 8

Joseph. Josef Beran was a professor of pastoral theology in Prague
and the Prefect of the Seminary there. He had already entered the
concentration camp in Dachau in 1942 and was able to give Richard
Henkes advice. Who could guess that the Archbishop of Prague, after
renewed suffering under the Communists, would become a Cardinal
in Rome exactly 22 years after February 22, 1945? Here in the camp,
all was striped dull blue-gray, but not all were equal. There were groups
of prisoners with influence, even with the guards, so you always had
to be careful. And woe to you if you had no friends in the camp. You
could not live and survive from the thin soup and the little bread you
were rationed.
Richard Henkes and Josef Beran got to know each other in
Dachau and became friends. They thought about the post-war pe-
riod that corresponded with the time after Hitler’s dictatorship. It
was not known what the country would look like, but there would be
areas where Germans and Czechs lived together, and it would certain-
ly prove difficult if the chaplains in such areas could not speak both
languages. Richard Henkes had already begun to learn Czech with
his barber in Chuchelna - a neighboring village and railway station
of Strandorf. His arrest took away this opportunity. At 43 years old,
he was now able to resume the language lessons with Josef Beran.
He looked intently towards the future: its uncertainty did not worry
him. Additionally, learning vocabulary and grammar drove away the
brooding in camp every day. Brooding made him homesick. Learning
gave him direction in this directionless environment. Richard Henkes
found it hard to learn languages. This had always been the case. If
someone had said to him in his Latin studies at Vallendar (Pallottine
Theological Institute) that he would later learn a foreign language
again, voluntarily, he would have laughed.
Richard had time to learn because he had a relatively easy job as
a canteen-keeper at Block 17. He was a sort of administrator for the
men of this barracks, in which prisoners from many nations spent the
first three weeks in Dachau Concentration Camp. There were pris-
oners from 30 states in Dachau and from 1938, there were prisoners
from the Czech Republic as well. The canteen store took care of food
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