„Zkurvená katovská práce“. Příběh vraždy dvou broumovských benediktinů v Šonově
“Bloody Executioner’s Work”. The Story of the Murder of Two Benedictine Priests in Šonov, near Broumov

Summary/Abstract: In September 1945, the bodies of the Benedictine priests Alban and Ansgar lay in a shallow ditch at the edge of a forest above the village of Šonov, near the Polish border. Several people from Šonov who remained in the village after the first wave of displacements and remembered the murder were banned from entering the forests. Klement Pavelka, the head financial supervisor of the Tax Authority, who lived in Šonov, was one of the few who sought a thorough investigation into the case in the summer of 1945, reopened it and also insisted that the victims be properly buried. He arranged for the local grave digger to exhume and transfer the bodies to the local graveyard, which later cost him, a non-communist, a job in the security forces. He began working in the coal stores in Broumov, and later was an accountant in the state farm. In the following decades, he would meet in Broumov some of those who had murdered the priests of Šonov. He died in 1990 without seeing the culprits convicted.

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