75 years ago, Operation Ř began: A silent war against faith and religious sisters
In the summer of 1950, the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia launched Operation Ř, a targeted campaign aimed at the liquidation of female religious orders. Nuns were forcibly evicted from convents, separated by age, and transported to factories and remote locations, where they were forced to work under horrific conditions.
Seventy-five years ago, in July 1950, the Czechoslovak regime launched Operation Ř. It marked a continuation of the brutal crackdown that the Communists had begun several months earlier with Operation K, which targeted male religious orders. After the "Night of the Long Knives" for monks, the regime turned its attention to female convents. Nuns were expelled from religious communities, some were imprisoned, others placed in dilapidated buildings, and eventually assigned to factories and workplaces where they were made to perform menial labor in degrading conditions.
Sister Teodora Kubínová, in an interview for Czech Radio České Budějovice five years ago, described her experience in Varnsdorf, where she worked among noisy machines and faced inappropriate behavior from fellow workers. Her story is just one of many. Sister Sidonie Jana Houštecká recalled the inhumane process of sorting nuns by age and dispersing them across Czechoslovakia, from Broumov to the Polish border.
Prayers had to be held in secret, without a Bible, under constant fear of discovery. The nuns were "swept away" from public view, sent to isolated places far from normal life. The youngest among them remained there until the fall of the regime, nearly forty years later.
A Novel as Testimony
This dark chapter of modern Czechoslovak history is portrayed in the novel Bílá voda (White Water) by Kateřina Tučková. She depicts the brutal suppression of female religious orders by the Communist authorities. Women who refused to adopt the party ideology were harshly punished, their faith and dignity trampled. Tučková reminds us that this was not only about physically silencing these women, but also an attempt to erase an entire spiritual community from the nation’s collective memory.
