Norbert Fabian Capek

From Philosopedia

Capek, Norbert Fabian (3 June 1870 — 12 October 1942)

The founder of Unitarianism in Czechoslovakian, Capek was the son of a devout Roman Catholic mother, Marie, and Joseph, a tailor and religious agnostic.

When 18 and disillusioned by his priest's cyncism, he was baptized a Baptist. In 1910 his interest in liberal religion was shown when he went to the 1910 Berlin Congress of the International Association of Religious Freedom, which he had attended at President Jan Masaryk’s urging.

The Liberal Fellowship, which led to the establishment of the Religious Society of Czechoslovakian Unitarians, was founded in 1923. In his The Absolute At Large (1944), he included a typically humanistic observation: “ ‘You know,’ Father Jost declared, ‘the loftier the things in which a man believes, the more fiercely he despises those who do not believe in them. And yet the greatest of all beliefs would be belief in one’s fellow men.’ ” A fellow Unitarian, Richard Henry, has written that it is difficult to be sure about details of Capek’s death:

• Norbert and his daughter, Zora, were arrested on March 28, 1941. They were imprisoned first in Pankrac prison in Prague, then sent to different prisons: Norbert to Ceske Budjovice, Zora to Dresden. Capek arrived in Dachau concentration camp on July 5, 1942, and was sent on a transport from Dachau to Hartheim Castle, near Linz, Austria, on October 12th that same year, where he was gassed. Nazi authorities gave the family the date of his death as November 3, 1942. (Bureaucratic convenience rather than truth determined dates given out for such matters by Nazi authorities.) That information was relayed by Karel Haspl, his son-in-law and successor, to Frederick May Eliot, then President of the AUA, who repeated the (mis-) information in an editorial in the Christian Register in November 1942. Official records in the archive at Dachau confirm the date of the transport and list Norbert as one of the prisoners so transported.

The International Association for Religious Freedom] placed a plaque in the Dachau camp in his memory. Of Capek's death, Eliot wrote,

• Another name is added to the list of heroic Unitarian martyrs, by whose death our freedom has been bought, Ours is now the responsibility to see to it that we stand fast in the liberty so gloriously won.

{U; WAS, <pdhenry@compuserve.com>, 21 April 1998}