In the Liščí settlement in the Beskydy Mountains
Download image
Metoděj Ondruch was born on the 30th of September in 1945 in Horní Bečva. When he was six months old, his parents moved to Hevlín, a settlement in the borderland area, where they acquired a smallholding that was abandoned after the expulsion of its former German inhabitants. In 1950, they returned but Metoděj did not want to live with his parents any more. He stayed with his grandparents, Ondřej and Karolina Hatlapatka, and he spent his whole life in their cottage. In Horní Bečva., he witnessed his grandfather joining the United Agricultural Cooperative and how he left the coop in 1969 in the times of political thaw. After finishing the basic school, Metoděj Ondruch apprenticed as a technician of vacuum appliances in the Tesla Rožnov factory and he worked there until 1990. The witness was active in public affairs in Horní Bečva. He played and coached in the local football club, he served as the chairman and the deputy in the local Sports Union, as a member and the vice-chair of the local council. Similarly, he was active in the Tesla Rožnov factory, he was the head of the Communist Party in the department of black and white TV sets, and he was a member of the factory Party assembly. In 2021, he still lived in Horní Bečva, in the house where he was born. [Note: the local Party organisations were often engaged in regular public or employee affairs and it depended on the people involved whether political propaganda and enemy bashing was all there was whether there was the compulsory veneer of said propaganda and the organisation worked moreless as any volunteer civic institution.]
