“We had three crates of grenades at home, we had crates of gunpowder, we had ammunition, we even got our hands on two functioning rifles. As boys. That’s how armed we were. Our parents weren’t allowed to know. Grandma wasn’t allowed to know – because I lived with Grandma and Grandpa. Grandpa knew about it and advised on how to handle the things. And his motto was. ‘It might come in handy to use sometime soon.’”
“We never deprived an honest Czech of a single spike [of corn], but when we saw it was a greedy farmer who brown-nosed the Germans, we didn’t go picking from his field, we pulled it straight from the sheaves or broke the spikes and threw them into sacks. Then we had to find someone who would thresh it for us because we didn’t have a thresher in the wartime. When we emptied the spikes from our sacks, the thresher wasn’t able to clean it at all. It was all grain, all chaff. So we had to get a farmer who was in the same boat as us, we knew about him, he knew about us. So we helped each other out like that.”
“That’s my fate. The others did a runner, they left the army, took off their uniform and went their own way. I did what they asked of me for a bit longer, but then I reckoned: ‘Why should I wreck my nerves when I can wreck my hands instead?’”
Zdeněk Hnízdo was born on 8 January 1931 in Záhuby in Jičín District. His parents and grandparents were hit by the economic crisis, and so he grew up in poverty. During the war and with the support of Czech teachers at his school, he and his classmates published a children’s magazine critical of the Nazi regime. He and his brother hid weapons and ammunition they had stolen from the Nazis in a barn. In 1946 he trained as a typesetter and found employment in Prague at Rudé právo (Red Law), the Communist daily newspaper. From the 1950s onward he served with the Inner Guard of the Ministry of the Interior, in the section tasked with protecting the uranium mines. He worked his way up to the post of deputy commander in Příbram. In 1968 he refused to accommodate the Soviet army in his garrison, thus showing his opposition to the invasion of Warsaw Pact forces. He was dismissed from the army and worked as a miner in the uranium mines until his retirement.
