Blahomír Basař

"No, no, no. We threw ourselves into it. You know, it was such a different mood after the revolution. We were so pushed by that freedom, we had such a terrible joy, we worked from sun to sun. Those beginnings were very hard. My grandmother helped us a lot, so that's how we got going. The kids that grew up in it, they thought it was automatic, they started helping us. That's how we developed. When we moved here, my oldest son was 14, that one was nine, and Jirka was four. Actually, they were very happy to go to the pigsty, to help. We were just starting out, we didn't have any equipment. Here, the JZD (Unified agriculture cooperative) already had wonderful equipment. They had foreign tractors, everything."

"Actually, they were already too old. My grandfather was 72 at the time and my grandmother, I think, 65. They had even joined the cooperative. They had to, they joined quite early in Drinów. There, I think, in 1950. But they didn't manage, the other agitators, to get the other villages to join. Even in that co-operative in Drínovo they didn't do well at all. There were a lot of old people and temporary workers who didn't know how to do it, so the Bolsheviks didn't know how to do it at all. So they came up with the idea of doing Operation Drinov: they evicted eight farmers from Drinov, even though they were in the JZD (Unified agriculture cooperative), and to scare the others, in the other villages, that they might evict them too. So they evicted them and banned them: they were not allowed back in the Mělník district for 30 years. They took the bare necessities, brought them to Kestřany. Vlasta, my uncle, my dad's brother, was a tractor driver there, and my grandfather and grandmother, I think they used to go and scare the ravens so they wouldn't eat the seed, and that kind of grandfatherly stuff, and they used to do some work at pigs."