Marie Hromádková

“The old man was your typical farmer who didn’t rest for even a moment. All of my memories of him are with him working. He even bought a thresher, and when he finished threshing his own [harvest], he drove around Tichá threshing for other people, because people didn’t usually own such a big thresher. He harnessed his cows and helped out. Then suddenly around 1949 there came a time when there was talk of a cooperative. I was in my first year of school at the time. We started getting more and more visits by people in leather coats. People were constantly asking questions, investigating. They even took Dad away one time. So we three children all rushed after him, worried they would hurt him somehow. The old man became terribly unhappy that the farm he had built up from 1916, he suddenly felt he would lose all of it. The cowshed, the barns, so many hectares. He had everything in exemplary condition. He fell ill from it, and the illness got worse and worse. He started having stomach problems, so they took him for an operation. It was probably cancer, which few people knew about back then, what it was and what it did. The doctors said his intestines were knotted. They sent him home from hospital to die. We prayed, we were there when he died. I know it was at one o’clock on 2 May. When it was time for the funeral, they harnessed the cows and put the coffin on the cart. We all cried, Mum the most of all. Withered cherry-tree blooms happened to be falling, and all of the petals showered the coffin as if in farewell. We were driving through an avenue that the old man had planted himself, and we were taking him to the graveyard.”