„My chosen one in whom I delight“ (Yesaia 42,1)
(10 years after Josef Werth was consecrated a bishop).
Excerpt from a publication.
„I was born in Karaganda on the 4th of October 1952. My family was Roman Catholic by tradition. My parents, Russian-Germans, had been deported to Kazakhstan when they were children – my father from the Volga region in 1931, my mother from the Ukraine in 1935. Thise who were compulsorily resettled in 1931 were having a particularly bad time. The train with the resettlers stopped in the midst of the bleak steppe. The people were asked to get off and carry along all their personal belongings. The train disappeared in the distance, and in the following time a new town was founded – Karaganda. It was late in the autumn, a rigorous winter was near at hand. Thirtythousand people began to dig themselves into the ground in the literal sense of the word. They covered the dug-outs with the twigs of bushes and layers of soil. In these holes, the deportees were forced to spend the winter; many of them did not survive ...
Many years later, father A. Khira, a member of the Uniate church and bishop in exile, who had been working with the German Catholics in Karaganda for 26 years, reminded the faithful of this „dignified German clergyman“, who had instilled a firm belief in the people’s hearts. He said that it was entirely thanks to these martyrs that a strong belief was able to survive even in those decades of cruel persecutions and oppressions ...
In fact, Karaganda was the biggest Catholic center in the Asian part of the USSR. After Stalin’s death many Catholic clergyman, who had been released from the Karagandinsk camps, worked there. At certain times there were more than ten of them. They surved our people for some time, but then returned to their native soil – to the Ukraine or the Baltic states, but some of them stayed in the place. When they stopped forcing the Germans to regularly register with the comamndant’s office, some immediately left for Karaganda - it had come to their attention that Catholic clergymen were living there. So it came about that the best Catholic forces concentrated in Karaganda.
I was baptized by Father Vladislav Bukovinskiy, who later consecrated me, as well, and Mum and my sister Gertrud Detzel prepared me for the reception of the sacrements. As far as I can remember, it was a matter of course in our family to believe in God. I had hardly begun to speak, when they tought me to reply to the question of who I was: „I am a Catholic Christian!“
During the time when I went to school, the Christian Catholic belief was confronted with all kinds of derisions, mockeries and humiliations by an irreconcilable atheism. But in spite of the persecutions, prohibitions and humiliations we never found ourselves in a state of oppression, as far as I remember, and we never had the feeling of being second-class citizens. We did not suffer from inferiority complexes. Maybe, our belief acquired some of the fighting spirit of our opponents. „God, church and soal“ – these are the words engraved on my bishop’s crest; they bear a deep sense in themselves, for which it is worthwhile to entirely dedicate oneself“.
Siberian Catholic Newspaper No.6, June 2001 (Newspaper published in Novosibirsk)