“One time I was going home - lights were banned in the night, everything was pitch black. To avoid having to go round whole blocks of houses, there were various alleyways. I was walking along when I was stopped by some people. ‘Lhotka?’ they asked in a funny accent. I said: ‘You’re going the wrong way, boys, Lhotka is that way and you’re going this way. Come, I’ll show you where it is.’ So we went around [the block], as they were already going through there, and I told them I would take them there. They said not to go that way, that we had to go by some road. I said: ‘Not by the road, the Jerries are there, an ambush commando, they’re often waiting there.’ And they were there waiting for them. So I went and led them all the way to Lhotka, and when we arrived I saw Olda Báča, Franta Machát, and Mirek Štěpánek, who taught me the cinema. So they said: ‘Now you know where we are, would like to help us?’ I said: ‘Why not, okay.’ And so I joined them. But they didn’t give me a weapon, not until three months later.”
“Then it happened that Vašek Trubák had so much gunpowder. I didn’t know where he got it from. He dismantled bullet, grenades, panzerfausts, and emptied the gunpowder from them. I said: ‘Venda, why are you doing that?’ ‘We’ll blow the bridge up.’ There was so much of it, so many fuses in case some of them didn’t catch... There were two hundred of them. The ditches were full of cars with Germans, Germans everywhere, and we had to get the stuff through them to the bridge. Vašek was afraid, but I said: ‘Come one, I’m not afraid.’ So we took his wheelbarrow, we cut up some grass, covered it up real high, put a scythe over it, and off I went. And you know that no one noticed me at all? I passed by so many Germans. He went round, and he couldn’t believe that the Germans had let me past.”
“I never spoke of it. I saw it as a duty and as something done and over.” (Q: “Are you glad that you did it?”) “You know, I am actually. Because it helped a person gain some courage and independence. The main thing was that a person stayed like that from beginning till end. Those were hard times, but not complicated. If you managed to get along the way you were, you had to be satisfied. Nothing weighing on your conscience.”
Arnošt Hrudník was born in Vienna on 6 February 1926, into a mixed Czech-Austrian family. His father was Czech, his mother Austrian, a war widow. The Hrudník family gradually gave rise to seven siblings, Arnošt was the third eldest. When he was two, they sent him to be raised by his grandparents from the father’s side, to Tršice near Olomouc. When he was ten, his grandparents died and Arnošt ended up in a children’s home in Moravský Krumlov, where he remained until the Sudetes were annexed in autumn 1938. He was moved to a children’s home in Uherské Hradiště. When he was sixteen, he began an apprenticeship at a shoemaker’s in Drnovice near Blansko. In the autumn of 1944 he became a messenger for the partisan troop Nazdar. He carried messages between the various partisan groups that operated in the region (General Svoboda group, Jermak group), he acted as a guide for people in hiding, he took part in several operations. He remained among the partisans until May 1945. After undergoing compulsory military training in the years 1948-1950, he married and moved to Kolín. He worked as a shoemaker in the co-op Snaha Mnichovice, and he remained in this employment for forty-nine years. In 1956 he met with his parents and siblings from Vienna for the first time in thirty-three years. Arnošt Hrudník died on 7 September 2014.
