Monsignor Vnislav Fruvirt

“The first air raid on Brno came quite late, I don’t remember anymore what year it was. One of our seminarians died there, too. I was already a seminarian myself at that time. He died young and we were at his funeral, which was held in Královo Pole, I think, and the air raid on Brno occurred that day in the evening. The funeral was during the morning and we only went to Brno in the evening, at around seven or eight, because the city was damaged. We were only able to take the electric tram, which is called shalina in Brno, to Tomášek at the square, and from there we had to walk to Petrov, via Husova Street. And the following day we discovered that there was a warning sign ‘Blindgänger’ – a timed bomb – on it. We had walked by that building and then it exploded at ten in the morning. There is a nice joke about it. A bomb was dropped somewhere and it tore off the front wall of a house. There was a row of toilets in the building and a guy was sitting there on the toilet on the seventh floor, and he was just one step from the abyss above the street when in exploded. Well, firemen reached him with a ladder and the guy was shaking with fear and he said: ‘But it’s really not my fault, I just pulled the flush handle and it exploded.’”

“At first there was interrogation, then there was the prison in Znojmo, then the district prison, it was in Cejl, and when the court session was over, they took us to other prisons again. And at that time, I don’t know how the policemen or communists decided on that... many priests were in labour prisons, where the regime was a bit more relaxed, and they assembled all of them into closed prisons. The priests who were sentenced to ten years of imprisonment were thus all sent to Mladá Boleslav, and those who had a sentence over ten years and more, were sent to Mírov. There were about 180 of us there, the whole prison was occupied. They transported us to Valdice, I don’t know for how many years. Then I went to work as a miner. I am a miner, who is more? You know that slogan. I was there for about a year and three months or so, in the East Bohemian Coal Mining area. Black coal is mined in eastern Bohemia, too. Then I returned to Valdice again, and I learnt the glass-cutter’s trade there and in 1960 I went home from Valdice.” – “What did you produce there?” – “Pendants for chandeliers, there was a glass-cutting workshop. The glass-cutting industry from the border region. The boss taught us the trade and we were cutting glass there. I was processing the tiniest pendants, the were pear-shaped like this… I don’t remember how many facets there were … eight, three times eight around the whole piece. So when you started cutting it, your fingers were cut through.”