"The worst thing was probably - I was already here in Roznov - when my grandfather, my husband, not so much, my grandfather... were very attached to the field, they just didn't want to put him in the cooperative. There were always a lot of people to convince. Maybe ten people would come to the house and they kept asking them to put the field into the cooperative, because our field and Jakšík's field in Laza was the most important one. So they kept chasing us. My grandfather didn't want to give the field, but then ten communists came to us and convinced us. Grandfather suddenly gave up and the persuasion was over. He fainted, they called the doctors quickly. Three of them came down and helped him, and he recovered. It was hard, they didn't want to give the field, but finally, after the cooperative was founded, they joined. I don't remember who joined the JZD first."
"There were German coaches, always with horses. There were no cars back then, you drove with horses and carts. Once the coach stopped at our place in Hážovice. They assigned some soldiers to each cottage, and the locals had to let them stay overnight. When Dad was in the village, they had to go around the cottages to get people to give hay for the horses and stuff. We had an old log cabin, and six of us slept in one room. So we had nowhere to put ten soldiers. They'd put straw in the council room, and they'd lie down on that, and the soldiers would put their rifles in this kind of pyramid, and everything would sit there in this big council room. There was an officer lying on an ottoman. My sister and I were lying on the bed and they were lying next to us on the straw on the floor. One of them suddenly jumped up and pulled a grenade out of his pocket. The officer started swearing terribly, took the grenade and Daddy and they had to put it somewhere where maybe a cat or a dog wouldn't drop it, put it in the car and shot it in the morning. At night they couldn't that it would cause any alarm."
"What I remember most from the war is how they shelled everything, shot everything. We had everything outside, even the little goslings. We were all in the cellar. Then the war passed, the liberators came. Then we could [go out]. Otherwise we had to stay in the cellar all the time. The Germans moved into the cottage, they cooked chickens in a big pot. There was a German tank in the yard, I remember that well. They were in the kitchen, I was in Roznov to do some shopping, I came back, nobody in the cottage, just German soldiers, cooking in a big pot of chicken. They told me that my parents were in the cellar, so I went in and all the boots were piled up outside by the doghouse, they were without shoes. Then suddenly they were shelling from Hutisko [they couldn't get to Roznov for long, so they shelled it]. The Germans kept shooting from the neighbors, where a German was hiding in the attic. He kept shooting, they couldn't get to us. Then when the Russian soldiers came, they had really bad footwear. The German soldiers jumped into the tanks and didn't have time to put on their shoes. The Russians put on all those boots if it suited them. When we were in the cellar, they [the Germans] took my father's horse for the turf. He had to go with them all the way to Prerov. Then the peasants made a deal at night and ran away, leaving the horses there. When we were waiting in the cellar, we suddenly heard the horses neighing. Papa went out, came back and cried. We got one horse back, the mare came home, completely bareback, no harness. The barn was closed, she stuck her head in and neighed until dad went to let her go. That's my first memory, I'll never forget it because I loved horses so much."
Jindřiška Koryčanská, née Hoffmannová, was born on 25 June 1933 in Hážovice near Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. Her parents, Zdenka and Josef Hoffmann, had a larger farm, her father worked as the mayor of the village during the war and later as the chairman of the union agricultural cooperative (JZD). Jindřiška was born the second of four daughters. The eldest Oldřiška came from her mother‘s first marriage. She lived through the war and the liberation in Hážovice. As a child she attended the local Orel. After graduating from the burgher school in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, she attended a folk school at the Agricultural School in Rožnov. After 1948, her parents had to hand over the land to a cooperative, and her father later became its chairman. In 1955 she married Josef Koryčanský and moved from Hážovice to Rožnov. Her husband‘s family, who owned land in Koryčanské paseky, resisted joining the JZD. Jindřiška Koryčanská worked for three years as a tractor driver in the JZD in Rožnov, then in the kitchen of the Agricultural School and then in Tesla Rožnov, where she stayed until her retirement. She and her husband raised two children. In 2021, at the time of filming, she lived in Rožnov.
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!
