Father decided that mom would pick only a few necessities without which we cannot be and that she would go to a village of Rybníky near Příbram, where dad's sister lived. He supposed that in case of war, I, my brother and mom would leave and dad, as a former legionnaire would stay here [in the Most region], in case war started. To our surprise, mom came back, crying. It was just after the Munich Agreement was signed. Dad's sister told her: "Henlein is your problem, sort it out yourselves."
"I heard the alarm but only vaguely. We quickly went to the coal railway station, bahnhof, as we called it. There was a railway worker shouting at me: 'There's an air raid here, look up!' Up in the sky, there was a silvery bright formation of airplanes and after a while, I even saw the falling bombs. I jumped off the engine along with the Czech lokführer, the engineer Mr. Böhm and together we ran to a shelter which was some forty metres away from us. It was a simple building with thin walls. And we survived the first air raid there."
"That was the ominous moment, it could not have happened differently. They caused such damage here and flaunted their hate towards Czechs so much that retribution was waiting to happen. It could not be handled differently. This is a nonsense and the view of today's people who do not have a clue about the reality of the divisive times. We need to start here with our thoughts and judge it differently. Here in the Sudeten, it could not have happened in any other way that people vented their hate in a total manner. Obviously, after a few days at the beginning, the emotions calmed down. Unfortunately, the so-called Red Guards arrived meantime. People from the inland who used and abused the whole situation and German loss. There was looting in which no local people participated. We would feel like filth even if we took one single spoon from a rich German. They looted and took away trucks full of furniture and all sorts of goods. These people caused worse damage than the local Czechs who sorted out their personal grievances."
"I got the first radio from the German anti-fascists. When I told them that we do not have any at home, they shook their heads and brought me one. It was called Blaupunkt and it was given to me by an anti-fascist called Beck [pause]... Brecht or some such. He was an excellent character, he worked as a building contractor and he was an important personality in the illegal group. Since then, I would listen to news from London and Moscow every day. I have to add that at the end of the row of houses along the road from Dolní Jitřetín to Komořany, there lived a German called Blockleiter. Mom kept in civil contact with him. He was no big Nazi at all, just an ordinary German. Whenever I listened to the radio, mom would come to me and asked me, 'Please, volume down and your ear to the speaker. What if he heard us and snitched? They will come and murder us all then.' Even though this Blockleitner was so close by, we managed to listen to news about the front situation every day with my dad."
Miroslav Hrabák was born on the 11th of January in Záluží u Mostu into the family of Josef Hrabák, a former legionary and a miner. His mother was a homemaker and she earned some extra cash by smuggling consumer goods across the border. This way he managed to accumulate enough savings to buy them a family house. It was demolished in 1940 to make space for the Nazi Hydrogenation Enterprises. In the same year, Miroslav was transferred to this factory as a forced labourer and he joined the local resistance group. On the 12th of May of 1944, he witnessed the first air raid aimed at the strategic centre of the factory; later, he saw the falling bombs a few more times. After the liberation, he joined the Communist Party and during the 1950’s he studied at the Faculty of Chemistry of the Czech Technical University and Brno University of Technology. Later on, he became the director of Plant 001 which prepared coal for carbonisation. He was one of the first inhabitants of the legendary Koldům (collective housing unit) in Litvínov. In 1970, at the factory conference, he delivered a speech that criticised the 1968 occupation, for which he was expelled from the Party and transferred to a lower technical position where he remained until 1989. He was among hundreds of those who were rehabilitated but not restored to their original work positions so he did not get back his director job. In 1995, he left the factory to work in a private enterprise. He authored several books about the history of the chemical plant in Litvínov and about the disappeared village of Záluží, which were published in the last ten years. Miroslav Hrabák died on 22 September 2020.
