Konrad (Josef) Just OCist
Personalia
Order Name:
Born:
Died:
Profession:
Persecution:
Imprisonment 12.03.1938 - 13.03.1938,
Removal from office 16.03.1938,
Imprisonment 10.06.1938 - 25.07.1938,
Dachau concentration camp 25.07.1938 - 27.09.1939,
Buchenwald concentration camp 27.09.1939 - 07.12.1940,
Dachau concentration camp 07.12.1940 - 30.04.1945,
Escape 30.04.1945
Curriculum Vitae
Josef Just was born in Hruschau in Silesia, the son of a railroad worker. The family later moved to Orlau. He attended school in Alt-Oderberg and grammar school in Teschen. After the destruction of the Dual Monarchy in 1918, the family was expelled from their homeland and moved to Walding in Upper Austria. Josef Just graduated from grammar school in Linz in 1921 and entered the Cistercian monastery in Wilhering in the same year, taking the monastic name Konrad.
Konrad Just studied theology at the Mehrerau and St. Florian monasteries. He made his perpetual profession in 1925 and was ordained a priest in 1926, after which he became a cooperator in Gramastetten.
On the day of the occupation of Austria by Hitler's Germany on March 12, 1938, Konrad Just was arrested. He was interrogated at the Ottenstein district court, released the next day and removed from his position as a cooperator three days later. The Gestapo continued to search for material against him and even interrogated children.
The indictment states that the parish population wanted Fr. Konrad to come to Dachau, and that his sermons were shunned by the people. Just the opposite is true. And it is only now that we can generally hear what Fr. Konrad said about National Socialism, which has come true.
On July 25, 1938, Konrad Just was deported to Dachau concentration camp. He was held in solitary confinement there for seven weeks from mid-October 1938 to the beginning of December 1938, was caned and only given food every fourth day.
The hunger was so great that I often thought about eating my own excrement. But the thought of my priesthood stopped me. I tasted some soft soap, gnawed on the laundry soap to help me. My strength dwindled so quickly that I also fell into a narcotic sleep during the day. The body's juices were poisoned by the constant darkness. My thoughts circled lazily and the uncertain future and the brutal events around me weighed on me with a leaden heaviness [...]
On September 27, 1939, Konrad Just was deported to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he witnessed the murder of Blessed Priest Otto Neururer. In Buchenwald concentration camp, he fell ill with hunger dysentery.
On December 7, 1940, he was deported back to Dachau concentration camp. Shortly before the camp was liberated by the Americans, the concentration camp prisoners were driven on a death march in the direction of Ötztal. Thanks to a rescue operation by two Jesuits, he was able to escape on April 30, 1945 and hid in the St. Joseph Congregation in Percha on Lake Starnberg until the end of the war.
On September 1, 1945, Konrad Just became pastor of the Gramastetten parish. Because of his folksy and rustic manner, he is known around Linz from the 1950s under the nickname Don Camillo of the Mühlviertel.
Places
Persecution:
Place of activity:
Citations
Katholische Universität Linz unter www.ku-linz.at
Wikipedia unter de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Just
