Květoslav Hána

* 1937

  • "When I was on the track here, I went to Austria back then. I got a promise from Hodonín from the bank. There was a very good director there and he always gave me a promise, he was rooting for me. When I came back from Austria, the race committee of the Communist Party always called me and always asked me what I was doing there and so on. And he started to blame me, how I could have got there. He was the chairman of the Communist Party. Jura Nahly, the vice-chairman of the Communist Party, was also there, and he believed me and told me not to take it that way, that he believed me and that I could go there again the second time. That's how I always got to Austria."

  • "Zátopek, he was the best guy, the best boy, really. He was very fond of everybody. He just didn't think about himself. He was friendly with everybody, got along with everybody. I also remember him having young guys around him and telling them about his experiences in the races. He was our single best runner and a very good person."

  • "First the Germans were with us, they were with us for about three days, I remember that well. They were very nice, the Germans. Then they had to leave, and finally, as the war ended, the Russians were with us again for about four days. They went many times, shot a rabbit, brought a rabbit and then my mother baked it. I remember that too. Or we were at the Mančíks', they had a cellar, and that was the last two weeks when the bombs were falling, I remember that. And we were in the cellar and nearby was Palanek, and that time they blew up Palanek, the bridge, the train was going there and they blew it up. The Germans were very good. At least they were nice to us. Then one told us that they didn't want to go to war, that they had to go to war. Then my uncle, who knew German, told us that, so they told him. They didn't want to go to war, but they had to go."

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    Veselí nad Moravou, 12.11.2021

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I‘ve been running for 70 years. I can‘t help it, I have to!

Brno, BVV, 1982, 10 km, 1st place
Brno, BVV, 1982, 10 km, 1st place
zdroj: Archive of the witness

Květoslav Hána was born on 11 April 1937 in Svatobořice. His father had a confectionery shop, his mother was a housewife. During the war, the Germans lived with the family for three days, and towards the end of the war, Red Army soldiers. The family got along well with the soldiers of both armies, there were no incidents. Around 1947, the then President Edvard Beneš passed through the village and the witness saw him with his own eyes. In 1948 the family‘s confectionery shop was expropriated by the Communists, and his father went to work for Elektrosvit. Květoslav Hána had been running since he was young, and in the 1950s he started running competitively at the apprenticeship in Gottwaldov (Zlín), and that is how he met Emil Zátopek. Together they sometimes trained and ran some races. Květoslav Hána also ran in the army in Psary near Prague, where he was from 1957 to 1959. He also continued running in Veselí nad Moravou, where he worked all his life at the railway and where, thanks to his contacts from the war, he took his coach and runner Jaroslav Štrupp in 1960. Thanks to the friendliness of the bank director in Hodonín, who supported him, he always received a foreign currency pledge and could go to races in „capitalist foreign countries“, even though he was not a member of the Communist Party. He did not stop running even after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, which he welcomed because his wife Marta could finally accompany him to races abroad. Květoslav Hána took part in the World Veterans Championships in Buffalo in 1995 and in Melbourne in 2002, as well as many other domestic and foreign races, from which he collected numerous awards. He is married with two daughters and in 2023 he was living in Veselí nad Moravou and still running almost daily even at his venerable age.