Moncure Daniel Conway  Paul Revere Frothingham

Norbert Fabian Capek (1870-1942)

Norbert Fabian Capek Norbert Fabian Capek

Norbert Fabian Capek was one of the martyrs of the free faith. Because he was an uncompromising foe of tyranny and a dauntless champion of freedom, he had to die. The Third Reich saw to that, for he and his religion were too dangerous to be tolerated. The method of extinction was bacteriological murder. His last six months were spent in the infamous concentration camp at Dachau—that, superimposed on a year of imprisonment in Prague, Budejovice, and Dresden. The judges at his trial dismissed the charge of high treason and imposed a sentence of one year for listening to the radio—a sentence already expiated by the thirteen months he had been in custody. Instead of being set free, however, he was sent, on the personal order of a Gestapo chief, to Dachau, with a note marked “return unwanted.”

It would be easy to dwell on his sufferings, to tell of the horrors to which he was subjected. The writer has visited the rooms where he was first questioned and seen the diabolical instruments that were used without mercy, and he has been in barracks and dungeons similar to those where he drew his last breath, and they were veritable hells on earth. But no good purpose would be served by concentrating on his closing days. For if life brings to our ears “the still, sad music of humanity,” it also brings a music that is neither still nor sad, but active and exultant. And that is thrillingly heard through Dr. Capek’s whole life, and particularly in the last months.

Dr. Capek was born in Radomysl, Czechoslovakia, in 1870. It is not without significance that one of his ancestors was Colonel Capek of the Hussite movement, who wrote the famous marching song, “The Lord’s Warriors.” The fierce blood of liberators flowed in his veins and caused him to set himself against the enemies of man’s spirit—not only the physical, visible foes, but those unseen adversaries—superstition and ignorance. He was a valiant soldier of liberty who marched under the banner of truth. Cradled in Catholicism, he quested for a larger and wider truth, and for a while he discovered that in Orthodox Protestantism. While working with his uncle in Vienna, he later said,

There were two possibilities open before me, for I met two young men there. One wanted me to go with him to a tavern, the other to a Baptist meeting. I chose the latter way and never regretted it, for my eyes and heart were opened at that meeting.

He studied for the ministry in the Baptist College and Divinity School in Hamburg, was ordained in 1895, and held pastorates in Saxony and Moravia for nineteen years.

Then, in 1910, he had a long conversation with Professor Thomas G. Masaryk, who was later to become the President of Czechoslovakia, and after listening to his views and beliefs, the great liberal thinker and statesman said to him, “You are a Unitarian.” In 1911 Dr. Capek and his wife came to America and served a Baptist church in Newark, New Jersey, and for a time edited a Slovak paper in New York. During the first World War when he and his family were living in Orange, New Jersey, Dr. Capek discovered through personal contact with Unitarianism how true Masaryk’s words were. Here was the gospel for which he had been searching. So, in 1921, he returned to Prague with a commission from the American Unitarian Association, and, with a glowing fervor that carried conviction, proclaimed his good news. He drew great congregations and soon established a church of 2,800 members, with eight mission stations in other towns and cities. He had a sturdy body, an alert appreciation, a well–stored mind, a vehement eloquence. Dr. Capek and his people were powers to be reckoned with in the life of the brave little republic. They supplied the basic spiritual foundations of democracy. That is why they were “a danger to the Third Reich.”

His work was not over when the prison doors closed on him. Like the alchemists of ancient Prague who sought to turn base metals into gold, so he took pain, frustration and defeat and fashioned out of them a shining glory. From his pen came mighty hymns of freedom—the bulk of them, it is true, destroyed by the Nazis, but some ten preserved, and sung with a fervor such as Americans give to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Nor was his tongue silent. Surviving fellow prisoners tell in glowing words of the magnificence of his witness to the truths he proclaimed. By what he said and what he was he fortified and uplifted those among whom he dwelt. As one Catholic priest who was with him bore witness, “He achieved his greatest ministry there—among the despairing, who lived in the very shadow of death. Without him, we could not have endured.” He was put to death early in November, 1942.