Ing., Ph.D. Petr Hruška

“Already as a child I had one close and straightforward means of contact with the mining element and miners via my mother, who went every day to work at the miners’ medical centre, where she cared for ill, ruined, exhausted, and half-broken miners. In the afternoon, when she came home, she brought stories. She brought news, messages, and impressions that she had experienced that day. They were always extraordinarily intense. As a child, I saw that on her. I saw how exhausted she herself was. How she was often shaken by the things she had seen during the day. All the hardships she had had to witness. I gradually came to the understanding that mining was some special kind of punishment, a hard lot indeed, and that miners must be extraordinary people if they are able to endure such things. At the same time, the way in which they expressed themselves at the clinic varied. They often arrived half-drunk, they came in irritated, nervous, irate, in pain. Ruined by their illness and their life. They expressed themselves very wildly, strongly. It was nothing unusual, or rather, it was a matter of course that the corridors of the miners’ medical centre were full of yelling and swearing. Doors were kicked. Sometimes a door would be kicked in when a miner had waited too long for his turn and felt he wasn’t being treated sufficiently well. He showed his displeasure very loudly and expressively.”

“Many of them came here as to a labour camp. To go live in Ostrava, that was nonsense in a way. People came here from the greater vicinity of Poland, Slovakia, Galicia, from various places as to a labour camp, with the impression that they’d earn some good money here, which mine work promised to provide. The moment they earn the money, they’ll get out fast. They’ll go somewhere else to live because it’s only work here. This is a labour camp, where you earn money. They’ll live their full somewhere else. Somewhere, where you can breath, where there are options, where you can get decent homes. Except that didn’t work out for the most part. The work swallowed them up, exhausted them. The money dissolved, invested into rehabilitation in the pubs. The liquor plague - that’s a term that was really used here. Suddenly they started to realise that their life here was for keeps. In the end, they had children, started families, and were stuck here. The place became their fate. It was then that they started to understand that something had gone wrong. That their dream, their goal, their idea had failed to materialise. That was another source of exceptional disgruntlement. Exceptional displeasure, irritation, and resentment.”

“To go outside meant to very abruptly come across those queer people. Queer in the sense that you could see their exhaustion, shabbiness, and often also brokenness, sometimes drunkenness. They were all dark. I remember that well, with my child’s eyes. Not really that they were soiled by coal slurry and dust, of which there was plenty down below. There was something dark inside them. You could feel that. A child’s eyes could even see it. There was a darkening of their whole existence within them. The whole of their fate, which was composed solely of that dreadful, hours-long toil, that terrible, purported relief of the free time they had when they came up the shaft - which they spent in bars and miners’ pubs. The relief really was only a purported one. Those who drink know that drinking is hard work. It’s a strain that doesn’t actually relieve either the body or the soul. In other words, they went from one strain to another. Then a short sleep and back down into the mine. This vicious circle, which repeated over and over again, in which their lives were trapped, was projected into their figures, their faces, into the way they behaved. There was a strange blackness, darkness to it.”