“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.”
“Those people were degraded mainly in two ways. In other words, the degradation had two sources. One was quite ordinary and physical. Life was reduced to existence. An existence that meant an almost inhuman strain - working in the mines. Followed by quick rehabilitation - seemingly, that is - in the pub, and then back down again. That in itself exhausts a person to such an extent that you don’t feel like doing anything else, or even have the strength for it. For any other activity, even it was there in the city. There wasn’t much to do in the city, but there was something at least. There was the theatre, the cinema, the park. All these options lost all their attraction to a physically exhausted person. The second type of tiredness, fatigue and anger, in fact, stemmed from the [miner’s - ed.] realisation that someone had cheated them. That the relatively generous wage they were promised - miners earned a pretty tidy sum back then - was useless to them. It couldn’t redeem their life, fix it, move it forward, because he’d just end up soaking himself up in the miners’ pub again. It won’t push a person forward. The miners’ started realising how stuck their lives were. They started realising that it would be like this forever and that they were trapped. And this was the source of their, I wouldn’t even say, anger, but quite honestly, pissed-offness.”
“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.”
Petr Hruška was born on 7 June 1964 in Ostrava. His mother came from Doksy, near Mácha Lake, his father grew up in the industrial area of Kramáře near Opava. However, the family lived in Ostrava, where his father worked in the chemical industry. His mother worked as a nurse at a miners‘ medical centre. After primary school Petr Hruška went on to graduate from the grammar school in Šmeralova Street, Ostrava. Because he did not match the ideal of the Socialist student, he did not receive a recommendation for university studies. He avoided military service by applying to the University of Mining, where he earned an „Engineer“ degree in drinking water treatment. He then underwent compulsory military service, serving in a motorised infantry regiment in Cheb and Karlovy Vary; he was later transferred to the mentally exhausting service of a military escort. Upon returning to his civilian life, he worked at the national enterprise Northern Moravian Water and Sewage Works. After the Velvet Revolution he studied literature at universities in Ostrava and Brno. He is now tenured at the Brno branch of the Institute for Czech Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He also teaches Czech literature at Masaryk University in Brno and in Ostrava. Petr Hruška is also active as an author. He has received several major awards for his works.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
