Agnesa Piasecká

"I remember only one teacher from school, I don't know his name anymore... who taught us something like civic education, maybe civic education. And he told us about the Prague Spring, about Dubček and so on. And he turned us on so much, well. We made a bulletin board, as if it was so current, well. Articles were cut out of the newspaper... it was there, we were so excited. And so during that year sixty-eight… Seven… seven, eight. So, even before arriving… Even before the arrival of the Russians. And even... like this. The Russians came in August, twenty one and we started the ninth year in September. And this exact teacher who activated us in this way told us, I remember exactly that... that no matter what happens, or no matter what he says in a week, in two, in a month... everything he has told us so far is the truth and for that's what he stands for, and let him be forced to withdraw and so on, it's no longer true. Well, then they forced us to take down the bulletin board in Dubček, and we fought for it, and we were... Today I have a different opinion. Today, I don't know... I hope I can say that, today I consider Dubček an old communist, the last law he signed, I don't even respect him that much, hey. But then it was like that, we were excited about how good Dubček is. And then you had some problems because of that... because you didn't want to take down the bulletin board, or... Well, we had, but at the school level. We had, we had, I don't know. Well, they went... like on a shift, other teachers too... put it down, because this, because that. I don't even know who put it down in the end, I just know that in that ninth year I was the class president, and I know that we insisted that it would be, that we wouldn't put it down... but it was put down. I don't remember anymore, I don't really know in what style or what they made us do."

“They… as farmers, as they mentioned, accepted it… or? Well, it must have been terrible for my grandfather, because they had seven children and they made a living by working in the fields... they grew wheat, corn, everything... for people and animals. Well, actually, if I'm not mistaken, in 1947, there was a big drought after the war. And I know that her last child, my aunt, was also born. But there weren't communists yet... there was a coup in 1948, so only after that. I have a memory of what my grandmother used to tell me about how terrible it was for them. They paid like, like my grandfather was kulak... they paid something they called a contingent. Something like, I don't know VAT. They were supposed to hand over the state... they had to determine exactly according to the area, I don't know... how much, hey. When they didn't have anything, nothing happened, but they had to hand this over to the state, but... And maybe... do you remember those numbers? I don't remember the numbers... they didn't say that. I only know that they raised two pigs. One was for them, a family of nine, and one, almost entirely, was for the state. So many and so many treatments, so many and so many. I don't remember the numbers. Maybe my aunt, not me. Well, and... well, that's what grandma used to say, that already when they were communists, that is, after the forty-eighth, that after the harvest, that means perhaps autumn... after the harvest, that they already had grain stored somewhere in the granary, corn and so on... and that they came to their house like that, the chairman of the national committee, hey... the main boss, a communist, a couple of guys, a wing. And with shovels... a gypsy, at that time he was not a Roma, and he used a shovel to put wheat in sacks and they took everything from them. They let them, I think, they didn't say it, but I also think that they wanted to force the grandfather to join JRD, a unified peasant cooperative. That they were saved, what that gypsy, when no one was looking, threw a shovel outside, outside... that, that. Everything was taken from them. I know that my mother never wanted corn in her life, not even boiled or anything, because they only had corn that whole year until the next harvest. They also ground it for bread, and so on. That they had great misery, that they felt very, very, very bad, then life was after the communists."

"Actually, when was your mother born? On the first... of the seventh, 1935. Thirty-five... I would still... because by the way, since you say you don't know your father, you probably don't know your grandparents from that side either. I know the name from that side. That way, I don't have anything to confirm it, I was just told. There I wanted to add a little more information, Vida Buljevic and she should be buried in Dubrovnik, but I don't know if she is or what the truth is, that's what I was told. There I actually wanted to add the fact that the grandparents had five daughters and one of them slept through the night… with the guy.. at the age of eighteen... that was a huge thing. It was not normal like today, that up and down, because basically in that village, the shame fell on the whole family and all those girls used to be affected by this. So my mother decided, with the help of my grandparents, to somehow cover it up and arrange a kind of marriage, and it basically didn't work... all their lives those people lived very badly, until they got divorced after about fifteen years. Well, and this... this guy, that is, my father, was called Božidar, and in fact, at the time when my mother became pregnant, he was accused of being a Yugoslav spy, a so-called Titovec! Then I looked at the history, what does it mean, who was Tito and so on, and he was locked up, and he was sent to the uranium mines, but I don't know exactly where. I never had a lot of means, but I didn't even succeed... I had one or two letters everywhere that I found in the estate of my grandparents, and I know that his last address was somewhere in Opatija, in Yugoslavia. Well, I … him in my life... not even in the photo, no contact. Come on."