Marie Hrudníková

* 1943

  • "We didn't know much from our parents at that time. They were afraid that if we said anything somewhere, they would arrest daddy and mommy would be left alone with three small children and with her grandparents taking care of two farms. [I don't know] how she would have managed it. At that time, Daddy had a tractor and a plough that they took to STS [Machine Tractor Station], so Daddy built a new small tractor himself. Now these kulaks, we were three uncles: my daddy, his brother who farmed the other eighteen acres, and my mommy's cousin. They bought a thresher and machines together. Daddy's great hobby was horses and foals. I remember when we lost our horses, we cried. Even my strong daddy, it was a tragedy. Failure to meet supplies was also a reason to arrest a kulak. For ensuring any kind of feeding of the nation to work or for the first and second-tier agricultural cooperatives to function, where the small farmers - the gardeners - were fed, the kulaks were prescribed extremely high demands of supply, which were very difficult to meet. In order to meet the milk supply and not have daddy arrested, my parents bought milk from the small farmers because those who were part of the cooperative could have one or two cows each. Of course, it was bought at three times the price. My parents used to say: 'We buy for seven crowns, we sell for two crowns'. I don't know if it corresponds, but this price stuck in my mind. Understandably, there were domestic pig slaughters on permit. Again - you could only keep some of that home slaughter, and you had to hand in most of it to the state. Lard, meat... It was prescribed what you had to hand in. Because [my parents] had eighteen hectares, we had people helping us with the work, and they were also happy to have some of the slaughter meat. So we did it in secrecy. All the people who worked for us remembered mom and dad very fondly. They weren't exploiters. We could only eat the cakes after the harvest when everybody who worked got their portion, even from the slaughter."

  • "The atmosphere was very tense, and we were anxious. We could tell that even our parents were anxious, we didn't utter a word in the kitchen. My brother was five years old. I was ten, he is five years younger. I brought the lard and my mother finished the doughnuts. She was still offering them, because Daddy accompanied them, and then they all came into the kitchen and- a discovery... They were walking around, and they were jangling a big bunch of keys in Mommy and Daddy's ear, and said to Mommy and Daddy, 'Where are these keys from?' My five-year-old brother started crying and said he got the keys from Auntie Navratilová to play with. This was an old lady next door who had an unwanted bunch of keys and gave them to our Jožin, so of course, our parents couldn't have known what they were for because he got them as a toy. They finished, and it became clear what the keys were for. The search also took place in the outbuildings, i.e. the barns, sheds, chicken coop, etc. We went to our little bedroom, where my brother, as a five-year-old, still had a crib and a straw mattress in his crib. Today's generation does not know what a straw mattress is. We used to call it a stružok, like today's mattress filled with straw. And the stružok was ripped apart. The hay was sticking out of it. So they were looking for that Premonstratensian gold even in this drastic way - that the strožok and the quilt were torn apart. So that experience with the doughnuts and the lard and the keys, that's my vivid memory you can't forget because it just kind of stays with you. Not as a grudge against those people, I don't even know who they were, but the memory of the cruelty of that time towards a certain group of people and that it wasn't right. Not like hatred, I don't want to say that, but just that whatever was wrong got your attention."

  • "My first impression when we got there - high walls with guards walking around with machine guns and dogs, with wolfhounds. They were circling it. Then there was this long walkway and something like a gatehouse, a few meters, maybe a hundred, from the wall. They led us to the gatehouse where we were supposed to wait. We were told what we could and couldn't do, and then we waited for my uncle. And now you see him coming from the wall in that striped prison garb, accompanied by a guard and his dog, being led along that sidewalk. My sister and I, we got so... we couldn't speak. My mother had experienced this several times, but it impacted us the most. And then we were older and we went to see him several times at Mírov, but Leopoldov made such an impression on us. At the same time as my uncle, Husák was locked up there. My uncle was brought into this sort of gatehouse, where there were two sets of bars, between them an alleyway with a guard. My uncle was behind one of the bars, and we were behind the other one, and in between us was the alley. We couldn't greet each other, we couldn't hug, we couldn't talk about certain things. So we'd chatter about school so he could at least listen to us. Mostly we were in tears and my uncle was cheering us on, unbelievable."

  • "For example, we used to fill our milk supplies by buying it for seven crowns from all the crofters. It was the little farmers who would only have one cow at home, right. So we bought their milk to fulfil the supply so that daddy wouldn't get arrested. And then we'd put it on that prescribed supply at a third of the price. So that's how rich we were, yeah. So we had to live very frugally at that time."

  • "How did it turn out? The funny thing I remember is how after a long - it took more than half a day, this inspection - suddenly, this National Security Corps officer came with a big bunch of keys. And he was walking around, we were sitting on a little bench, we kids had this little table, and he was walking around with this bunch of keys, and he was alternately jingling it in mommy's and daddy's ears, and he kept walking around to find out where the keys were from. We just didn't know, we didn't know what keys they were. So when it went on for a long time, my brother, who was five years old, started crying and said that he got them from a neighbour, whom he called Auntie Coufalová, an old lady who used to play with him. So that's how the affair with the keys ended.

  • "So they took the machines away from us for that STS [Machine Tractor Station], the basic machines. Dad then subsequently - we were a progressive family, a hard-working, progressive family - so subsequently, he made another tractor. I remember from my childhood, as a kid, when it was snowing outside. The kids at school would shout at me that the kulaks were falling. So I was like- mentally, I didn't feel good."

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Justice yes, but hate no

Marie Hrudníková
Marie Hrudníková
zdroj: Witness archive

Marie Hrudníková, née Tobiášová, was born on 21 September 1943 in Senice na Hané to parents Josef and Marie Tobiášová as the eldest of three children. Her mother Marie, née Tylová, came from Cakov, her father from Senice. Both families had farms. Uncle Josef Heřman Tyl, a Premonstratensian monk, was persecuted by the Nazis and the Communists. During the war, he underwent concentration camps. In the 1950s, he was sentenced in the political trial of Pícha and Co. for treason to 12 years. He also served his sentence in the Jáchymov camps. In 1946, he became prior of the monastery in Teplá and in 1989, its abbot. In the 1950s, the family was impacted by collectivisation. They had to meet the high supplies, their property was taken away. In 1957, they joined a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). Marie and her siblings had problems with their studies because of their cadre profile. In 1960, she finished the eleven-year school in Litovel, and between 1960 and 1962, she studied an economic follow-up study in Mohelnice. She then worked as an accountant all her life. In 1966, she married Vojtěch Hrudník, an electrician who came from an agricultural family from Přestavlky. After their marriage they lived in Senice na Hané, from 1973 in Olomouc. They raised three daughters together. In 2020, at the time of filming, they lived in Velký Týnec.