Karmela Antonija Premrov
The Congregation of Mary’s Sisters was founded on Slovenian soil. Its co-founder, a Sister of Charity from Graz Leopoldina Brandis, has dedicated herself very thoroughly to charity. She saw new needs and looked for new opportunities. The Sisters of Charity at the time were not allowed to stay with the sick during the night, so she began to raise girls who were willing to leave everything and to devote themselves with motherly love to the abandoned and sick in their homes.
In Ljubljana, in the shelter of St. Jožef, where today is a student dormitory on Vidovdanska cesta, she gave three girls a regular garment in 1878. This marked the beginning of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Sick, which in 1926 took an independent path and was renamed the Congregation of Mary’s Sisters from the Miraculous Shrine.
The new post-war Communist regime cruelly interfered in the activity of the sisters. Their mother’s house was nationalized and the sisters exiled. They had to find an apartment and a job: from relatives or acquaintances, in hospitals, in nursing homes, in factories, as housekeepers in parishes or male monasteries. They were not allowed to carry out their mission, they were not allowed to wear their religious clothes. Sisters from the Maribor and Celje communities were taken to forced labor in Kočevje.
Edward Kocbek saw and wrote many things (although the authorities tried to isolate him completely). Thus he writes in his diary on 17 April 1947 about his increasingly clear realization that ”the regime is acting more and more relentlessly against the Church.” He heard that ”the Sisters of Notre Dame from Ljubljana are now being persecuted, as well as the School Sisters in Šiška and the Salesians in Rakovnik.” Two partisans ”started iconoclasm.” Then Kocbek writes: ”Kraigher (Boris, Minister of the Interior) clearly says: “This is a war between church and state, in which the state will not give up until the church falls to its knees.”
Antonija Premrov, born in 1912 in Martinjak near Cerknica, joined the Congregation of Mary’s Sisters before the war. As a nun, sister Karmela studied to be a nurse at the Vincentinum Institute, while at the same time studying music and becoming an organist; she had a very special talent for music and singing. She worked at the then Schleimer Home. When the Communists came to power in 1945, the circumstances of the Sisters’ activities changed dramatically. Authorities closed the monastery in 1948. Antonija Premrov returned home and got a job in a sewing shop. As a nurse accustomed to working with patients, she complied with a request and went to meet a sick woman with a disability, who was in a wheelchair. At that time, there was no organist in the parish of Cerknica and she was invited, at the request of the pastor, to be an organist. The choir had numerous members. Mostly young people sang in it, many were attracted to participate by a popular sister. The choir revived Mass services, and religious life in the parish was visibly animated.
Sister Karmela Antonija Premrov irritated more and more the Communist authorities. Witnesses say that at the beginning of 1949, at a party meeting of Communists, they discussed what to do with this sister, who affects the religious life in the place in such a way. On her way to a singing rehearsal on January 14, Tito’s Communists arrested her, threw her in a car, and then tortured and humiliated her to the extreme for several days. One of the torturers, a local, later said that the eyes of the dead sister were constantly following him.
Her body was thrown into Lake Cerknica. In August 1951, a local, Žnidaršič, struck the remains of a decaying sister as he mowed along the shore of the lake where the water receded. The locals wanted to bury her with dignity, but the Communist authorities prevented that. They took all her remains and threw them in an unknown place. She is not buried with dignity to this day.
It is evident there was fear of her influence even after her death. The lady, who personally knew Sister Karmela well, said: “She was killed to destroy the singing and participating in the Mass. In doing so, they made religious life impossible in order to make religion as weak as possible. You know, she died such a death that she was a martyr.”
Source: radio.ognjisce.si
Editorial/komunistickizlocini.net
