"I joined the military service in October 1953. I expected to get to the labor camp as my peer farmers. I don't know if I joined the artillery in Jičín by mistake or by accident. Hard training, night service, twice half a year in a tent in the military area in Brdy did not bother me at all. When compared to what I had to experience in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative, it was actually nothing. Overall, I was fine, I was just worried about how it was at home. My sister got married and her husband, a veterinarian, was placed in Velvary after his studies. The mother was left alone in the cottage and she was further the target of attacks. She once wrote to me that after returning from the field, she found an open house, my belongings thrown into the hallway, and tenants were moving into my room. She was told by the local national committee that they needed to house Jednota's salesman, the blacksmith forcibly opened the front door and then they no longer needed to talk to her."
"We were convicted for not fulfilling deliveries, even though we were members of the Unified Agricultural Cooperative. It was a small amount of wheat - about 5 quintals - from multiple delivery fulfillings. Another favorite piece of the powerful ones was the regulation of the unsatisfactory supplies. They identified personal areas and included crops difficult for manual work. Of course, we could not fulfill the plan. We have endangered the nutrition of workers. We were each sentenced by the People's Court in Mladá Boleslav to six months in prison. I wanted to take the whole punishment, but I was not allowed to do so."
"And so it went on and we somehow managed it until 1952. They started inviting us to court for non-fulfillment of deliveries, but we could not fulfill those deliveries for simple reasons. At first, nine machines we were disposed from us - I say ‚confiscated’, but there was a document for that – so it was bought up. A complete threshing set, a tractor with tools and even a shredder, so if we wanted to shred, we had to drive to the mill. Everything became difficult. There were only three of us, so some relatives and acquaintances, even strangers, came to us to work for food, because there was still little food in the new republic. We had to pay for the work with milk, flour and various other products. So, we could not deliver and there were penalties for that. In the end, in the fall of 1952, people agreed, or I don't know how it happened, but they all joined the Unified Agricultural Cooperative - even the small farmers who were doing fine. I was fifteen years old in 1948, and actually older in 1952, but since I became a co-owner after my father's death, I was called, without my own merit, as a village 'rich man.'
Josef Cihelník was born on October 15, 1933 in Libichov near Mladá Boleslav as the second child of Stanislav and Marie Cihelník, the natives of Libichov. The parents had a rented homestead with a farm and worked on the area of 21 hectares. In February 1944, the Cihelník family had to move out within 48 hours so that a family of German refugees could be accommodated on the farm. Until the end of the war, the Cihleníks lived in Libichov with their grandmother. Josef remembers other „national guests“, but also events from the end of the war, especially the expected arrival of the Red Army and the executions of two German soldiers. After the war, the family returned to the original farm and bought it in 1946. After 1948, the Cihelníks faced the pressure in connection with the collectivization of agriculture. On the top of that, in October 1948, the witness‘s father Stanislav suddenly died. In 1952, Josef, the then nineteen-year-old as well as his mother were sentenced by the People‘s Court in Mladá Boleslav to six months in prison for not fulfilling the mandatory levies and „endangering the people‘s nourishment.“ However, she did not go to the prison thanks to the amnesty of the incoming President Antonín Zápotocký. At the time when Josef was performing his basic military service, his mother continued to be the target of attacks because she refused to sign the membership in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD). The National Committee moved foreign tenants into her house without asking her permission and in her absence. After returning from the war in 1955, Josef signed a membership in the collective farm and worked in it until his retirement. He and his wife raised two sons. Josef Cihelník died in 2022.
Collection of medicinal herbs on the Chlum hill, which was attended by the whole town school of Dobrovice, which Mr. Cihelník attended - the period of occupation
Collection of medicinal herbs on the Chlum hill, which was attended by the whole town school of Dobrovice, which Mr. Cihelník attended - the period of occupation
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