“The collectivisation affected everyone in Prušánky because even those who had the least property, it all went to the co-op. It was painful for everyone, because everyone was convinced that the soil would sustain him in any situation. Which is true because during the war, the village practically fed itself. And it even fed the town, although they don’t want to admit that. Do you know how many people came here to buy flour, lard? It was a kind of barter. They’d bring a shirt and ask for half a kilo of lard, say. [Q: The collectivisation was unpleasant in that it took away people’s motivation to look out for their own and look after themselves.] Exactly. But more than that – they lost their relation to the soil. Today, I can’t imagine young people suddenly going off... My wife and I, when I’d already finished at the local council here, we did some farming. We still enjoyed it back then.”
“I ran for Moravia. That was, what was it called back then, I can’t even remember, but I ran for Moravia [presumably some political movement or party - trans.]. The funniest thing was that I got the most votes out of anyone in Prušánky. What I did was, say, I kept the births and deaths register, I was pretty active in the cultural sphere, but it wasn’t like I had any direct connections to the village leadership, no. There were all kinds of groups in the council, the parties too, but they didn’t want to cooperate. [Q: What do you think is the hardest part about being a mayor?] Your relationships with people and their relationships with you. You know, because sometimes you have to solve unpopular things there, too, relations among neighbours, for instance, or when you’re deciding about something that’s unpopular. But it’s manageable.”
“I was a member of the Czech Numismatic Society, and as members we had a branch in Uherské Hradiště. And I always travelled to Uherské Hradiště once a month. And I would use the occasion to visit the regional museum in Uherské Hradiště. They had a wooden cross there, which stood in Prušánky in the place where there’s a stone cross today. I still remember it, the wooden cross. And seeing that there was some flooding or something back in the past, it was going to collapse. So to avoid it breaking up and falling apart, it was dug out in ’42 and taken to the museum in Uherské Hradiště, where it is today. Well, and when there was talk about it, that there was to be that thing [village anniversary] here, I think it was... Jenda Nosek, my former pupil, and he came up with the idea whether a monument of that kind might be built here. He agreed, took it under his auspices. Well, and when it was approved in this way, there’s nothing left for me but to act in the matter.”
František Hradil was born on 1 December 1932 in Prušánky, Hodonín District. He enrolled at the classical grammar school in Velehrad in September 1945. When the school was closed in 1950, he switched to a grammar school in Uherské Hradiště and then in Hodonín. He graduated in 1952 and was soon employed as a clerk at the South Moravian Fitting Factory. He was drafted into military service in 1953. Because there was a lack of teachers in the Břeclav area, he received a recommendation for a teaching post there. He completed the necessary qualifications while already in the job. In 1958 he married Marie Hlaváčová. In the late 1970s he studied paedagogy at the Faculty of Arts in Brno; he was employed at the faculty in 1972 and worked there until 1990, when he was elected mayor of Prušánky. In 2010 he initiated the erection of a wine-growers’ cross, which he carved out of wood. The cross was blessed in 2011. František Hradil passed away on April, the 28th, 2021
