Master of Fine Arts Petr Kubánek

“Dad was fired shortly after 1948, he worked at the ministry of light industry here on the embankment, where the ministry building was. And we used to go there to visit him, I remember that, but I don’t remember the circumstances. They dismissed dad from his job, because he was a so-called ‘westerner’ and the communists either imprisoned all ‘westerners’ or they made their lives miserable by dismissing them from jobs. Dad was then unable to find any other job and because he already had a family, my sister was born and then another sister shortly after, and we were a total of four kids. So when dad was searching for work, the only option was that he learnt the electrical fitter’s trade and then nearly until the end of his life he was going to work at construction sites all over the country.”

“They led dad away for interrogation about two times, but we did not think much about it… Dad would simply go somewhere, all right. I remember that my mom always cried, she was scared what would happen to him, but fortunately about two or three days later he would always come back. So it was like this.”- “That means that he remained there for some interrogations?” – “Probably. He never spoke about it at home. I only remember the cops, who came to our home. There were two men, who talked to us children, they normally talked to us like adults talk to children, you know, and they were asking us questions, and I only realized it later that they were actually asking us about people with whom dad had contacts.”

“From a farm, not too large farm. The farm had about 48 hectares and the communists had in their constitution that if they had less than 50 hectares, the farmers were allowed to farm independently. But grandpa was a very progressive man and for instance, he built a cowhouse in Kyškovice that delegations were coming to there see. He built a cowhouse for cows and from one side there was a kind of a ropeway for bringing in fodder, and from the other side they were taking out the manure, also in a ropeway hanged above the centre aisle, without any wheels or anything like that. And every cow had its own drinking fountain, which was designed so that water started to flow when the cow pushed it. So grandpa constructed this cowhouse back in the 1930s. But the communists then wanted… and they invented this scheme against my uncle - deliveries that he was absolutely unable to fulfil, never, and they sentenced him for that. Some slandering articles even later appeared about him in the newspapers that were being published there. My aunt kept them. And they imprisoned him for two years. But unfortunately, my uncle was imprisoned in Jáchymov where they mined the uranium ore, and shortly after his release, he lived for some time and then he died, because he had contracted some radiation-related disease in Jáchymov, and he died. They evicted the whole family from Kyškovice. One day they told them that a car would arrive for them the following day in the morning and that they would need to leave the place. They made them get on trucks and they transported them all the way to Šumperk, to the Jeseníky Mountains, where aunt then lived with their two children, she had two children, but there were also other farmers, so-called kulaks, from the surrounding villages and she later befriended them. They didn’t know each other, but they became friends. She always used to say…they were placed into a hut which had openings in between the log beams and wind was blowing through. It was in winter when they transported them there... or in autumn, well, it was after the harvest time. And they lived there for at least two years and they had no water there, obviously; well, there was nothing there.”