World War II veteran Vladimír Hrozný died on January 6 at the age of 100. He spent his last years in Brno. The final farewell will be held on Saturday from 13:00 at the Nostalgie ceremony hall in Modřice near Brno.
Vladimír Hrozný was born on May 5, 1923 in the Ussuri taiga in Russia. After the invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany, he voluntarily joined the Red Army, where he served first as an infantryman on the front lines near Leningrad, then as a pilot flying the Ilyushin Il-2 fighter jet.
After being injured in an airport bombing in 1944, he could no longer fly and became an explorer. Through Bessarabia (Moldova), Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Austria, he reached Czechoslovakia and fought in southern Moravia. During the Prague Uprising, he was sent as a scout to Prague, where he was captured at the end of the war. He was wounded a total of four times.
After the war, Hrozný married a Czech woman and obtained Czechoslovak citizenship. In 1946, he and his wife left for the Soviet Union, and she later returned. However, the Soviet authorities did not allow Hrozny to return. When he wanted to cross the border illegally, he was reported by a smuggler and arrested, but escaped during transport to Lviv and across the Czechoslovak border.
Hrozný then lived in Bratislava and earned his living as a car mechanic. However he was arrested again and sentenced to ten plus three years in the gulag, where he spent several years. He returned to Czechoslovakia after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, but his wife had already remarried. Hrozný then worked in the mines in Ostrava, at a machine and tractor station in northern Moravia. He met his current wife Maria during the construction of the D1 highway. In Russia, he was rehabilitated in 2004 after being imprisoned in the Gulag.
“Certified bacon geek. Evil social media fanatic. Music practitioner. Communicator.”
