Czechoslovak Political Prisoners - über das Projekt Political ...

Interview with Julie Hrušková
Where did you grow up and what are your early childhood memories?
I was born on May 18, 1928 in Boskovštějn, which is a small village not far from Znojmo 1 . My
father worked as a gamekeeper for Earl Trautsmandorf. Our house was a gamekeeper’s lodge
in the middle of nowhere, about thirty minutes from the village where we went to school.
I was left-handed and they tried to force me to write with my right hand and they used to slap
me on my left. That’s why I didn’t like school very much. However, we had good teachers and
we were learning how to write neatly, read books, and even love literature. I had two sisters
and a brother. Together with my brother, we took our cattle out to feed, but my brother liked
to go and see the boys in the village and used to tell me, “You will watch the cows now.” I always
answered, “Okay, but bring me something to read,” because I used to be a keen reader
then. Sometimes I would forget the cows and they ran away. I had quite a nice childhood and
I went to my senior school in Jevišovice. It was an hour journey to get there, but the milkmen
usually gave me a lift.
Can you remember how was your family doing during the war?
During the war, the property of the Earl came under German custody. There was a person
appointed, a Czech, who wanted to appeal to the Germans and wanted to open a grammar
school on the castle land. At that time, we attended senior school already and when father
asked us, “Would you want to go to a German grammar school?” we were getting education
along the lines of President Masaryk’s philosophy and patriotism, so we said we didn’t want
to go to that grammar school and our father refused the offer. My father’s subordinates were
timber men who cut trees and woman workers who planted trees or picked strawberries and
raspberries to supply the castle. They eventually said that if Hruška’s children weren’t going
to go to the German grammar school, their children wouldn’t go there either. The man who
made the initial proposal for the school started to dislike my father, of course. In the end, we
moved on to a farm in Blaný and my father worked as a field hand there. They grew carrots
and other things there. There were hired workers who worked for the Earl and they stole carrots,
of course. My father was responsible for that. They brought some carrots to my mother
as well and when there was an inspection, they searched the cellars and found some carrots
in our cellars too. They all went for a trial and got ten days in prison. My mother told herself
that it could be worse if she appealed, so she accepted the sentence. The hired workers didn’t
accept the sentence in the end, they appealed, and they got a pardon. So, my mother went
to prison in Moravské Budějovice for ten days during the war and she saw with her own eyes
what it was like there. My father was fired, we had to leave the flat, which came with his job,
and that’s why we rented a house in Černín u Jevišovic and moved there. My father was called
up to do forced labor in a bakery in Znojmo to replace an Austrian man who had been sent to
the battlefront. At that time, Znojmo was an annexed area already. My father worked in the
1 Znojmo – town in South Moravia.
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