Monsignor Vnislav Fruvirt

“Well, I was thinking about getting a job. I enjoyed driving and all that, and so I applied to the Transport company as a tram conductor. ‘Yes, great, we are hiring, we are hiring…’ That was because tram conductors had to sign a contract for at least one year, they could not just leave right away. And it is a work with irregular duty hours, one day you work like this, and then like this, and they were searching for conductors all the time. And so I applied to work as a tram conductor. ‘Yes, yes.’ In the personnel department they told me: ‘Yes, you are hired, we will contact you.’ But two days later, a notice appeared in the newspaper, that the drivers’ course was starting, and I still didn’t know anything. So I went to Pisárky in Brno to the personnel department by myself, and I told this to her and she replied: ‘Mr…,’ well, not Mr., she addressed me as a comrade, comrade was still used at that time… ‘But Comrade Fruvirt, you returned from prison, is that so?’ When the procurator informed us about the amnesty, he talked about bright future for us, and so on. ‘But you have come from prison, well, yes, but it says here, at least two years of manual work.’ An order like this came, and so I applied to work as a cleaner of tram rail switches.” – “For how long did you work there, two years?” – “Nearly two years. But there were good guys in the Transport Company, and so I applied for that course, I passed the drivers’ course and then I worked as a tram driver for four years, until 1966.”

“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.’”