János Szerednyei (26 May 1920,

Szerencs Szerencs is a town in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county, Northern Hungary. It lies away from Miskolc, and away from Budapest. It has about 9,100 inhabitants. History Szerencs grew into a town where the Great Plain and the Zemplén mountains meet. ...

Hungary Hungary is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning much of the Pannonian Basin, Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croatia and ...

– 26 July 1948, Voroshilovka,

USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

) was a Hungarian

Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the List of Christian denominations by number of members, largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics Catholic Church by country, worldwid ...

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deity, deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in parti ...

who voluntarily joined a group of his parishioners from

Tarcal Tarcal is a village on the eastern edge of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén county, northern Hungary, in the famous Tokaj-Hegyalja wine district, from Miskolc. Geography Tarcal is located at , at the western foot of the 516 m high Nagy Hill at Tokaj ...

set to be deported to the USSR in 1945. He died in an accident in a coal mine, where he was working.

Biography

János Szerednyei was ordained in Kosice on 11 June 1944. After ordination he was sent to Tarcal as

vicar A vicar (; Latin: '' vicarius'') is a representative, deputy or substitute; anyone acting "in the person of" or agent for a superior (compare "vicarious" in the sense of "at second hand"). Linguistically, ''vicar'' is cognate with the English p ...

with the local

parish A parish is a territorial entity in many Christianity, Christian denominations, constituting a division within a diocese. A parish is under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of a priest#Christianity, priest, often termed a parish pries ...

. After the arrival of the

Red Army The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often shortened to the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People ...

, on 24 January 1945 the Soviets began to round up people in Tarcal for deportations to work in the USSR. The church rector and the vicar went to the Soviet authorities to request that the group be let go, or at least the women and children be excluded. (According to some sources they wanted to buy the people out with wine – Tarcal is a part of the

Tokaj wine region Tokaj wine region ( ) or Tokaj-Hegyalja wine region (short ''Tokaj-Hegyalja'' or ''Hegyalja'') is a historical wine region located in northeastern Hungary and southeastern Slovakia. It is also one of the seven larger Hungarian wine, wine regi ...

.) They managed to achieve freedom for some of the women and one couple on condition that János Szerednyei goes instead of them. He agreed to do so and went to the vicarage to collect a few necessary belongings. The group was supposed to work for just three days. The deportation was a part of the practice of what the Hungarians called the "málenykij robot" (from "small work" in Russian). It involved taking people by force to do work ranging from half-a-day cleaning of rubble to deportation to the

gulag The Gulag was a system of Labor camp, forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word ''Gulag'' originally referred only to the division of the Chronology of Soviet secret police agencies, Soviet secret police that was in charge of runnin ...

, from which one could never return. After a few days of waiting and then a month-long trip, the group finally arrived at their destination: camp number 7144/1223 in Voroshilovka, Uspenskij rayon, Voroshilovgrad Oblast, in the

Donetsk Donetsk ( , ; ; ), formerly known as Aleksandrovka, Yuzivka (or Hughesovka), Stalin, and Stalino, is an industrial city in eastern Ukraine located on the Kalmius River in Donetsk Oblast, which is currently occupied by Russia as the capita ...

coal basin. They were to work in the nearby Voroshilov coal mine ( in Ukrainian). Szerendnyei worked as a miner 400 meters under the surface. His camp number was 542. In the camp he wrote poetry, played the violin and tried to raise spirits of his fellow prisoners. Sometimes he would celebrate the

Mass Mass is an Intrinsic and extrinsic properties, intrinsic property of a physical body, body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the physical quantity, quantity of matter in a body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physi ...

in secret, for this was punished with detention. As a sign of recognition for his work he received a black suit from the camp leadership. He died in an accident while returning from work in the mine. Tired, he was sitting on a coal carriage, whose brakes suddenly broke down. The carriage began to roll faster and faster back into the mine and the miners started to jump. Szerednyei jumped too but he hit himself on the temple and died on the spot. As he was the best worker in the camp, the camp authorities allowed that he is buried in a coffin, which counted as an exception then.''Örkényi Ilona tanítónő, fogolytárs, "a második koronatanú" vallomása'', in ''Szerednyei János. Tarcali káplán hősiés életáldozata'' Budapest: Kalot Kiadó, 2005, p. 32.

Memory

A plaque commemorating János Szerednyei is located inside the Catholic church in Tarcal, where he worked.

Gallery

Bibliography

* H. Örkényi Ilona ''A tarcali káplán sírhantja'' Budapest: Masszi Kiadó, 2000 * ''Szerednyei János. Tarcali káplán hősiés életáldozata'' Budapest: Kalot Kiadó, 2005 * János Szerednyei on th
Számon Tartva
page * János Szerednyei in th

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Szerednyei, Janos 1920 births 1948 deaths Hungarian Roman Catholics Hungarian prisoners and detainees Prisoners who died in Soviet detention