Jan Hradecký

* 1947

  • "Yes, it's a mining rank - a foreman who is in charge of a certain section of the mine and of the workers in there, say fifty of them. It's no fun. He has to keep records and keep track of the miners: 'Hradecký is here; next, here... Where is Martínek? The crook...' Here's how they did it: There was a lamp room upstairs. As apprentices, we used the 'bucket' or burner lamps. Then they took them away and gave us belt batteries and helmet lamps. When you came to work for the morning shift, you got a round tag, mine was number 210, and you'd go to the clean cloakroom. You'd strip off, go to the dirty cloakroom and put on your mining overalls, and then you'd go upstairs to the lamp room. You'd take the lamp off the recharging rack and just hang your tag in its place. That's how they kept track of us."

  • "Near Přebuz, there is a town of Nejdek down there. There was a Wehrmacht team in Nejdek, just three soldiers, a feldwebel and two total newbies. They were meant to go somewhere to guard something, but they didn't go and ran away with the feldwebel and went up to Přebuz. The feldwebel came from Plavno and the others lived nearby. They came to Přebuz and said, what the heck, they threw away their rifles and sat down to rest. Somebody must have turned them in, likely by telephone, who knows. There was a so-called Major Heln, an SS, who knows what rank he was actually, and he came there with his suite and they caught these guys and hung them on a tree, shot them with machine guns and buried them somewhere behind the mine in the forest. My dad knew about it, including where it happened, from the gamekeeper who saw them burying the soldiers, but of course he didn't want to be seen. You know, the SS were there, so he would end up six feet under too... They buried them there. After the war, my dad knew from the gamekeeper where it was, and I said, 'Why don't you report it?' And my dad said, 'Look, you know what, they're already dead, so let's leave them alone, there's no point, that's what happened.'"

  • "My mother's maiden name was Marie Mullerová, and her father, who was with the Klatovy dragoons, was killed in the First World War. Mum told me the story. She was a very little girl, and World War I was on. He came home on a leave, and she said she remembered he was such a tall man in red trousers, a blue blouse, a sabre, and when he was killed, his stuff was sent home. I don't how it arrived but it did, including the sabre and even the revolver, and then when the Nazis came, my parents were afraid, so they turned the sabre and the revolver in. They made a mistake, they should have hidden it."

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Kraslice, 08.03.2024

    (audio)
    délka: 01:30:13
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

A thousand metres underground

Jan Hradecký, 1970s
Jan Hradecký, 1970s
zdroj: Witness's archive

Jan Hradecký was born in the border village of Hraničná-Markhausen in the Sokolov region on 6 December 1947. The family did not stay there for long. After the communists came to power, the free movement of Czechoslovak citizens across the border was forbidden and passports without an exit clause were no longer valid. A border zone was declared. The new inhabitants of Hraničná had to leave again. In 1955, the village and the adjacent houses were levelled by government decision. Jan Hradecký and his parents moved to Kraslice. His father worked as a SNB officer. His mother Marie, née Mullerová, was a trained seamstress. Her dream of owning her own tailor shop was crushed in February 1948. She found employment in the nearby Oloví flat and mirror glass factory where she was in charge of labelling the plant equipment. Jan Hradecký trained as a miner. Having completed his military service with an engineering unit in Bohosudov, he worked as a miner until retirement. He spent most of his time at the Marie Majerová shaft, the last deep lignite mine in the Sokolov region. Jan‘s grandfather used to be a miner and witnessed the explosion at the Nelson mine in 1936 and the subsequent miner strikes in Most and Duchcov. Jan Hradecký is keenly interested in the history of his home of the past seventy-seven years. Kraslice is a town with a history typical of the borderland, from the rise of Czech Germans‘ nationalism in the 1930s to the usurpation of the Czech borderland by Hitler to liberation by the US Army in 1945 to the unfortunate post-war development with all the injustices of history both big and small that occurred over the ensuing decades. All the while, lignite was being mined a thousand metres deep under the ground. Jan Hradecký did so for thirty-three years. He retired after his final shift on 21 December 2002. He lived in Kraslice in 2024.