I was a full-time StB employee, to get closer to the people
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Věroslav Kudrna was born in the village of Křepice in the Znojmo region on 29 June 1929. During the Second World War, he helped his father, Václav Kudrna, as a partisan liaison in resistance activities. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 on the basis of a denunciation and subsequently imprisoned in Jihlava, Brno and finally in the Flossenbürg concentration camp. In 1953 the family lost their farm as a result of collectivisation. Even before that, in 1948, Věroslav Kudrna moved to Brno for work. He first worked briefly in a car workshop and in 1953 joined the Ministry of the Interior where he worked until his retirement in 1985. Most of his career was spent in the State Security Service (StB, then part of the Ministry of the Interior). According to his own words, his work focused only on the development of Czechoslovak sport, but surviving archival documents do not confirm this. In 1974, still as an employee of the StB, he became the organisational secretary of the Red Star Sports Union in Brno. He was involved in the construction and expansion of sports facilities, including, for example, co-organising the construction of a ski resort in Dolní Morava. He also assembled the first Czechoslovak shooting sports team whose member, Josef Panáček, won a gold medal at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. Thanks to his sportsman career, over the course of the 1970s he visited East Germany (GDR), Hungary, Poland, the Soviet Union and repeatedly Lausanne, Switzerland. He was a member of the Communist Party since 1956. Věroslav Kudrna was living in Brno in 2023.
