Josef Čermák

"It was on 6 December 1953, when we left Lhota [pod Přeloučí]. An armed escort arrived and determined what we could take. We had an electric washing machine, which we could not take, and it was finally loaded secretly when the guards were not looking. They also forbade us to take a German typewriter, they simply specified the things we were not allowed to take. And the worst thing I remember was when they loaded us on December 6, of course the guards sat inside the cab of the Rena car, but we - that is me as a thirteen-year-old boy, my mother, and my mother still had her mother - so the three of us, of course, they put us on the back of the truck, wrapped us in blankets and we traveled on the back of the truck. And now I'm getting to the worst part, that when they loaded us up and we left, my mum's mother cried the most and the whole time she just kept asking, 'Where are you taking us?'"

"After February [1948], the pressure to establish cooperative farms started to increase as part of collectivisation, but my father was of course against it, so they needed to get rid of him. His administration work at the local committee, where he concealed some supplies, it was the first incipient pressure to set up a cooperative farm in Lhota [pod Přeloučí]. And so my father was sentenced to ten months and the confiscation of property began."