Josef Bábek

"Daddy had a problem. When they took away his field, which he had fertilized and which was beautifully tended, they gave him the so-called parish field, which was rented and which nobody took much care of. Then he had a problem to meet the contributions they imposed on him." - "In what year did they take that field from him?" - "They took it away from him in 1952/1953, by the fifty-third year he was already arrested, maybe even in the fifty-first year of course, because to be able to get monëy form him, all those fines for not meeting the contributions and all that. They just stripped him of all the money he had saved up to have for his old age and everything, it all came to nothing and then they arrested him. About four months in Ilava and one month in Hradiště."

"When they [the Germans] fled to Kvasice across the Morava - there was the Morava, between Kvasice and Tlumačov there is the Morava and there was a bridge - they fled over the bridge and blew it up. My older brothers, who were about fourteen or fifteen years old, put Czech flags out of the dormer window on top. Of course, the Germans saw it, so they hit and broke half of our house, and I remember only the chimney, it stayed on that one brick and moved."

“Dad didn’t want to join the cooperative. He was against this whole parcellation thing and against everything that went on. Maybe he listened a bit too much to Free Europe. And he still thought that someone would help us, that our the Allies won’t leave us in the lurch. He was against the parcellation and everything that went on here because he didn’t want it to end up like it did in Russia, or the Soviet Union as it was back then, with the sovkhozes and kolkhozes. Those were kolkhozes, kollektivnoye khozyaystvo. He didn’t want us to end up like that. Well, but it’s hard to stand up to the power of the state on your own. He was a cow breeder, so they split up his fields all the way to the other end of the village, so he’d have it as far away as possible. They did things like that back then. They gave him the worst field, it was called the priest’s field, it wasn’t even manured or anything. And of course they loaded him with quotas for all the things he was to deliver. He couldn’t fulfil them, of course, and he didn’t, so they imposed fines on him. And when he ran out of money, they locked him up. He was convicted in Hradiště of failing to fulfil his quotas as a notorious slacker. Those were such times.”

“My brothers really manned up well and proper back then. We originally had some Germans lodged there with us. The Germans made a run for it, of course, because we were being liberated by the Romanians. The Russian forces didn’t go there, the Romanians liberated us. Well, either way, they came somewhere from the direction of the hills and down into the plains. Those are the Chřiby Hills. Well, and the Germans retreated towards Kvasice. The River Morava is there, there’s a bridge there. Back then the Germans blew it to smithereens so the front couldn’t pursue them. The Russians then built a pontoon one instead. And when they had crossed the Morava, my brothers hung out the Czechoslovak flag. The Germans saw that, of course, they probably saw where they had stayed, and they were battle hardened, so they took pot shots at our house. Twice they missed, the third time they really hit us. They broke the whole roof. There was a big hole in the roof, of course. And the chimney was there, and the top part of it hung on just one brick and swung to and fro like this. We went to have a look, and the dust was swirling all around, the chimney held by a single brick. And that’s how the Germans left.”

“Then I was to go as a technician to Romania. A technician, now that’s someone who sits in the sales department and manages the assemblers in some way, the things around, and that’s where people meet up. They obviously sent a query to my previous work places. The ones from ČSAD were fine, but the manager from ČSAO, he wasn’t even supposed to get the memo. My head of supplies received it. He was quite a good bloke, a normal sort. But the manager happened to be there at the time and asked: ‘What have you got there?’ And he said: ‘An assessment of Bábek.’ – ‘Aha, well give it here.’ So he took it and wrote: ‘He participated in petition activities in 1968.’ And back in the Uničov Machine Works we had just such a numbskull, Zorek was his name, [local] chairman of the CPC [Communist Party]. And he was pretty sore about that year of ’68... But the interesting thing is that he was a awfully big Communist except when he retired – I know that because I had contacts in Libina and he was in Libina – he didn’t even pay his CPC membership upkeep stamp. He didn’t give a fig. Suddenly he wasn’t a Communist any more. The upkeep stamp only cost a few crowns. All of a sudden that great Communist Zorek didn’t even have the means to buy himself a CPC upkeep stamp. And back then that Zorek took matters in his own hands and said: ‘We won’t be represented abroad by such vagrants.’ Well, and I immediately found myself kicked out of the service [department] and in Komořany, that’s in North Bohemia, past Most, where I worked as an assistant riveter.”