"I came to the school and the headmaster yelled at me, 'How come you didn't sign the placement form for the Unified Agricultural Cooperative?' And I said, 'I found a job elsewhere.' And he said, 'You want to start from the minister's chair!' And the other girls went to the school at 14, and I didn't go there until I was 17. So he said it was not appropriate start like that and I hadn't achieved anything yet in my life and that I had to sign the placement form."
"And the director brought the officer there, and he wondered how come the former owner was still there. The director said to him, 'But he's improved the place a lot in the two years he's been here. He arranged poultry farming there, standardized chicken coops were built there, chickens were raised there, and hatcheries were arranged there.' And the officer said, 'Well, we'll go after him until he leaves.' But the director was a nice guy so he called my parents and told them about it. My father knew that they had locked his brother up for almost nothing in Jáchymov where he ruined his health."
"We were hiding when the Russian Liberation Army came by. When they came to our farm they 'liberated' us from all the cattle - they killed the chickens, made a fire in the yard and roasted the chickens. The Soviet army 'liberated' us like that. They took the best cow out and killed it with pitchforks. I know that they came to my grandfather and grandmother and stood by the wardrobes and threw things out. My grandmother was picking it up and putting it back because they wanted to take it to the poor. We were considered enemies even then, enemies of the regime or enemies of the people in general. By being born on a farm, we were the bad guys."
Jaroslava Jarošová, née Bouzková, was born on 30 December 1940 on a family farm Krevlice near Velká Bíteš. After the communist takeover, the farm was nationalized and the family was forced to leave Krevlice in 1950. After finishing primary school she was not recommended to study at the agricultural school for political reasons. She first had to study at an apprenticeship school for a year and then work on her family farm as part of her school practice. Only then did she study at the poultry school in Prostějov, which was the only one in Czechoslovakia at that time. In 1962 she tried to apply for a distance university course, but was not accepted, again for political reasons. She experienced the Prague Spring with enthusiasm, but the subsequent invasion by Warsaw Pact troops was a huge disappointment. During the normalisation period, she changed various jobs. After 1989, her family was given back their farm in Krevlice. In 2022 she lived in Velká Bíteš.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
