Blažena Froncová

“There was also a certain Mr. Panocha living there – a sort of a character from Jičín. He was a candy maker and made so-called ‘certle’. It was a sort of a glass candy – it smelled a bit of anise. He would sell them at the annual fair. He was a sort of a weird guy. He had a beard. Then he became the guard of the local gate. At noon and at nine o’clock in the evening, he would blow his trumpet so that the people knew what time it was.”

“One day, I came into my office and found an application for membership in the Communist party on my desk. The chairman’s signature was already there – the application had to be signed by two attestants or two recommending persons and one more person. The chairman told me to sign it and not to worry about it. My daddy, who had been a national socialist, later told me that I was supposed to sign it. He said that I would have been better off if I had put my signature to it. He said that I would have been allowed to keep my job and would have made a glamorous career at the district council. I wrote to my schoolmate, Bedřiška: ‘Bédo, just imagine this, I had an application to the Communist party in my drawer. There’s no way I’m joining them. I ran away from the council to Čeřovka to sulk. I’m not going back there anymore. I’ll not sign it’. By coincidence – later on, I was much more cautious when writing something – that letter in which I openly threw dirt at the Communist party, was intercepted by the police. Her brother was a pilot and they were just about to flee to Germany. He had an airplane in Cheb and everything had already been set up. The police was checking their mail and intercepted this letter from me to my friend in which I wrote that I hated the Communists and that I would never join the party. The police then informed the district authorities about it and I was in trouble again. You can imagine that being a secretary of a Communist chairman, it was very inapt from me to write things like that.”

“Director Kazda came and said: ‘girls, come here, I want to tell you something. Today, I was in Popovice to persuade the people to join the farming collective’ (these Communists had the nerve to do this). So this nerd went to Popovice to persuade the people that they had to join the collective and there was a woman who had a couple of little fields and two daughters studying in Prague. He boasted: ‘I told that old rag to join or else her daughters will be kicked out of school. Girls, you’ll see that she’ll come tomorrow and join’. She came the next day and joined. Another clerk from the district department of agriculture was telling me his story: ‘Blanka, I got beaten today’. He went to a place called Ohavčí or something like that to persuade the people to join the collectives. Everybody had to join. They gave you that sort of an offer you couldn’t refuse. They said either you’ll join or else your family is going to suffer. He told me: ‘Blanka, they beat the hell out of me. They chased me with their scythes in processions when I tried to talk to them about joining the collective. I had to run for my life as they wanted to cut me to pieces.”