Josef Antonín Jičínský

“My father was sentenced in the 1950s and then again he got some fine for shortage in compulsory deliveries. And he was missing some amount, I don’t remember exactly, but he was like 2000 kg short in deliveries of wheat, that was quite a lot, and had he not delivered it on time, another fine would have been imposed on him. But there was certain Mr. Bachaň, he was some sort of a boss there and he coordinated the agricultural work, and they parted with my father in the evening and imagine that, the following morning he comes to my father and says: ´Come and have a look in the yard.´ And this Mr. Bachaň had made calls around the whole village, and now in that yard there were sacks of wheat, whatever each person could give, even 25 kg bags from cottagers or from the other farms, there were several of them… It was touching to see how the village held together.”

“My father experienced the October Revolution in Russia. As I said, he was there for seven and a half years. And the revolution of 1917 took place in Leningrad, in Moscow, but then it slowly spread to peripheral parts of that empire as well, and it reached Turkmenistan in as late as 1920. And my father was there… He enjoyed a good position, was in charge of a large farm, and he managed it well. So everything was fine, but when the revolution came, everything began to change – violence erupted, I won’t even go into detail about what happened there – and after that he simply wanted to return home. So he arrived in 1921 – pretty late for an arrival from army service, and began to work on our farm. And after the revolution in 1948, this coup d´état of February 1948, he spoke to me, and he said: ´Look here, we are an old family, but this time it doesn’t look good, I will see how it goes on, but personally, I don’t see it well at all.´ And sometime at the end of 1948 – this was really good – he himself offered the farm for them to take over. It was the first farm in the whole Pardubice region. So the head of the district arrived, the political bosses arrived…we nearly had it with flourish.” (Interviewer: “So he surrendered the farm willingly?”) “Yes, he offered it out of his own will, because he understood where the situation was leading to.”

“When we returned from our shift – most of the people worked the morning shift, we came to the room, and it started – Marx Leninism education, in its most primitive form, and we were really desperate because of that. And we listened to it for a day or two…the next day we came back from the shift, and it was not playing, it was torn off the wall. I thought, well, this is good, this is good… But the following day the broadcast was played again, and this went on several times, but they eventually gave it up and we were free from that.”

“There were old miners who knew how to organize strikes, from the First Republic era. The way they did it was that before the shift they picked up their lamps, but they did not go down the mine. They would stay in the yard, there was lot of space, and would they just sit there. And then they did it again, I am now talking of the afternoon shift. I remember the weather was really nice and we were already given our miner’s lamps, but we were not able to do anything, so we just also sat down in the sun. And they formed a large crowd, there were several hundred of them, and they discussed and shouted anti-communist slogans - ´We will show you!´ and so on – and then several trucks with armed soldiers arrived there through an open gate. The soldiers encircled them, and we stood aside, we cowardly stayed aside. And the soldiers lined up around them, about 10 meters apart, and the miners were shouting at them: ´Ain´t you ashamed, attacking workers?´ And they did not say anything, only stared at them, quite like a sphinx, but the atmosphere grew dense, it was no fun when they had weapons. So the situation changed - I think the communists had planned it so – and in about twenty minutes another truck came, with only eight or ten soldiers and they had sub-machine guns. They made a circle around the first circle of soldiers and again, nothing was happening. It was planned precisely to the minute, or I think so, and now it was evident it’s getting serious. And after half an hour a Tatraplan limousine arrived, with a regional communist party secretary and two other officials, and he got out and he certainly did not speak any words of comfort to them. He was straightforward: ´We are a workers´ state, but if the workers are unable to understand it, they gotta remain aside, they gotta disappear.´ He was speaking for about three minutes, not longer. But he was firm; it seemed they would carry them away that very moment, on those trucks that waited there. And the guys? They bowed their heads and went down the mine for their shift, and that was the very last strike in our country.”

“There, one’s task is to escape the given order in some way. But it was not so easy, and everyone would have liked to do it. So we had this idea and we started art club meetings; we had a studio upstairs. So this was our haven, we were creating relief statues, like portraits of Žižka or Komenský. And then there were groups that stayed in the house all the time and were doing cleaning all the time. And we even laughed at them. We would go often outside, but they always stayed inside and did the cleaning. I don’t know where this comes from, that the society is stratified like that, why it is so.”

“Every time I lead these discussion sessions with students, I try to stress the atmosphere of the constant fear in which we lived all the time. And of course, when you are together with a couple of guys, you make jokes, too, in spite of whatever danger you are in, but still, the fear is present in each one of you. Because we.... we were robbed of all the dreams we had, each of us had some ideal in life, something to strive for, and now it was all interrupted, and not everyone was able to cope with it. And in this sense it was extremely difficult. I don’t want to promote myself, nothing like that, but I speak of my own life experience, right... To me, it was like plague, most of us had girlfriends, well, who wouldn’t have when we were twenty, twenty-one. And after few months I got a letter: ´Please, don’t be angry with me, but you know.´ She was my first girl, she spoke three languages, she worked in radio broadcasting... Quite simply, she wrote to me directly, at least that was nice of her, and she wrote that I did not know when and whether I would come back, anyway. And that she did not want to marry me anymore. And in the environment we were in, that was a blow. Even now I remember how hard it was. But a good thing was that you were not alone in that.” (Interviewer: “That’s what I wanted to ask you, whether you had any friends there?”) “We were a bunch of people, several close friends, and they supported you if something serious like this happened and that made it bearable.”

“So I drew my first exam question, OK, then the second question, OK, the third one, OK, and it seemed I might get an A. And now Dr. Kratochvíl, whom I will remember as long as I’m alive, turned at us. We had about five communists in our class – that was a lot, in other classes there was only one or two – and Mirek Skočík was also there. Those who got admitted to the Agricultural college were mainly people with practical experience, who passed the secondary school-leaving exam in just a year’s time and went straight to college - and he was one of them, he was a former secretary of the district committee of the Communist Party in Hodonín and at the same time he was the chairman of the Party’s committee at the college, so he held all these high positions, and this Kratochvíl was completely ridiculous compared to him. So he turns to the comrades who were there and asks: ´So, comrades, what do you think, should we let him pass?´ This was what he said. And Mirek – we eventually became friends, it couldn’t happen otherwise; he was about forty and I was twenty, and he said: ´Absolutely, comrade professor, for he answered all the questions correctly.´ And he gave me a C.”