"There were two big peasants in the village. If these peasants would leave! Because they knew how to farm the big acres. No, they evicted them. Within an hour. I remember that. Some Danek from Horni Street. He had two pairs of horses, about six head of cattle, some pigs. Bring your hay wagon, put in a sack of flour, duvets, blankets, clothes and get out!'
"There was a coup in '48. A new set of comrades came in and pulled out the old ones, the orthodox ones, to shield them. So he stepped in. 'Come on, comrade, we'll give you a post. You'll be the head of the Brno State Security.' A post. That's how it worked, good. Fifty-one came, the Sling-Slansky affair. At 2 a.m., someone rang his doorbell. He opens the door, two guys: 'Comrade, we're from Prague, we need you to come with us to the office immediately. We need some lists. He took his coat, they put him in the car and drove him to Prague to Pankrác, where they locked him up and he was there for a year. Every night they woke him up three times with a paper to sign. Nonsense. 'I won't sign.' He barely fell asleep, again. That's how they tortured him. That was a man a head shorter than me. But he had a great inner strength."
"But it took all day and the Russians were nowhere to be found. The next morning, we saw a little gas truck on the access road. It passed, nobody shot at it, it passed behind our house, and there it was already hidden. And the guys immediately: 'Oh, the Russians are here! Let's go!' But the Germans mined all the access roads from different sides to the village. There was a bomb squad to deactivate the mines. So they got a few champs and a neighbour on one street knew where the mines were. So they got in the car and went to show him. But unfortunately, the bomb squad was drunk and looking for it under the leaves. When he was screwing in the fuse, it blew. It tore the guy apart."
"I used to ride here from Lesná to Bohunice on a motorbike. And on the morning of the sixty-eighth, I heard it on the radio, but I said, 'I'm going.' Tanks everywhere, full of soldiers and our people everywhere and they were shouting, screaming, with their fists [threatening]. Finally, I managed to zigzag through the tanks at that station and I went up that Bohunicka road and above the crematorium, as I was going up the road, there was a boy shot, a young boy, about twenty [years old] shot dead. And there was a gentleman kneeling by him."
"I was less than three years old, four, and Germany annexed Austria. Mobilization was announced, my father enlisted in an artillery regiment in Dolní Dvořiště on the border with Austria. And there they waited to see what would happen. But the German citizens who claimed that area of the Sudetenland were constantly fighting and making mischief and threatening, crossing the border, so our soldiers had to intervene. But suddenly the whole German army invaded and our soldiers didn't even have time to put on civilian clothes and had to run! Literally. So my father came home in his uniform, his military uniform. That's what I remember, when he came in, I rolled my eyes at him and he put a brigadier on my head and I marched like a soldier through the kitchen. That was my ultimate memory of that period."
Lubomír Hluštík was born on 14 February 1935 in Kvasice, Kroměříž region. His father Ferdinand Hluštík was the owner of a local horticulture and his mother Aloisie, née Hodumíková, came from Slovakia. After the February coup, their horticulture was incorporated into the local unified agricultural cooperative (JZD), expanded and his father became its manager. Lubomír Hluštík followed in his footsteps and graduated from the secondary horticultural school, first in Lednice and for the last two years in Děčín, where the school was moved in 1953. After two years of compulsory military service, he started working in the JZD in Kvasice. From 1959 to 1967 he was employed as a gardener in the Stiassni Villa in Brno, which was then used for government representative purposes. He married and had a son, Lubomír. He graduated from the University of Agriculture and in 1967 he joined the Secondary School of Horticulture in Bohunice and later in Rajhrad as a master of vocational training. He remained employed there until his retirement in 1995. In 2023 he lived in Brno.
The christening of his son Lubomír, on the left his parents, Lubomír Hluštík, below him his wife Eva with their son, on the right his sister-in-law with her family, 1960
The christening of his son Lubomír, on the left his parents, Lubomír Hluštík, below him his wife Eva with their son, on the right his sister-in-law with her family, 1960
