This Week in Texas Methodist History  June 20, 2021

 

Czech-Texas Pastor Repatriated, June 1942

Joseph Paul Bartak, superintendent of the Methodist Mission in Prague, returned to New York City in June, 1942 on the diplomatic ship, Drottingholm.  His 900 fellow passengers were other Americans who had endured months of detention in Nazi camps. 

 

Bartak first came to the USA in 1907 as a nineteen year old from Bohemia which was then part of the Austrian Empire.  He went first to Chicago, and although he knew no English, he was hired by the Chicago Tract Society to distribute religious literature among his countrymen living in Chicago.  After attaining English fluency, he enrolled in Southwestern University.  One of the attractions of Southwestern University was that Williamson and Bell Counties had numerous Czech-speaking residents, and Bartak preached to them.  At different times he was affiliated with both the Central Texas and Texas Conferences.  While in the Texas Conference, he lived in Marlin and served congregations in the Brazos Valley.  After Southwestern, he enrolled in Vanderbilt where he earned a B.D. and the University of Chicago where he earned an M. A.  In 1925 Southwestern conferred an honorary doctorate.

 

When Czechoslovakia was formed after World War I, Bartak volunteered for missionary service there and, with his wife Marian, started building the Methodist Church in his homeland.   

 

In December 1941 when war was declared between Germany and the United States, the Gestapo arrested Bartak and imprisoned him in a Prague.  After several weeks he was transferred to a castle at Laufen, Germany, near the Austrian border.  The Germans had commandeered the castle to hold internees. 

 

While at the castle, Bartak acted as Chaplain to his fellow internees including fellow Methodist missionary G. P. Warfield who had been captured in Warsaw, Poland.  (My Uncle Charles Hardt had been a missionary to Poland, but when missionary donations decreased during the Depression, Charles and Ruby returned to Texas.  If they had been in Poland, they would have also been interned.)  In gratitude for his daily worship services, his fellows presented him with a “diploma” signed by his “congregation>”    He was able to bring that document back to the US.  He also brought back a Czech Bible printed in 1488, possibly the only surviving copy and possibly the oldest Czech Bible in existence. 

 

Bartak came to Houston in November, 1942 to attend the Texas Annual Conference and returned to preaching to Czech speaking congregations.  He went back to Czechoslovakia after the war, but returned to the US fairly frequently.  Marian Bartak was a popular speaker at various Schools of Mission.  She related her experiences in organizing  the first Epworth League and the first Wesleyan Service Guild in Czechoslovakia.  The Communist takeover and subsequent suppression of Christianity forced them to relocate to Vienna.  Jospeh died in 1964.   .