Ing., Ph.D. Petr Hruška

“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.”