František Noháček

“From my acquaintances I know about one incident, when a woman illegally slaughtered a hog and her neighbor reported it to the authorities. That woman ended up in a concentration camp for it, because slaughtering a pig during the war was a major offense. That was no triviality. That neighbor was probably envious of her and thus she informed the Gestapo and…”

“For instance my brother-in-law – he was an enormously social man. I didn’t go to the pub. I was seeing my friends but not in the pub. He went to the pub, he was a member of the football club, he let the football players play on one of his fields and helped them in every possible way. In spite of that, they signed a waiver for him to leave the village. When they wanted somebody to move out of the village, three communists had to sign on to it, that they so wished. And they did sign it for him. It was in Senice.”

“They would organize these meetings where they tried to talk the farmers into joining the farms collectives. But they wouldn’t change their minds. These campaigns came in waves and they were centrally organized in order to break the resistance. They tried to convince the people that joining the collectives was immensely advantageous. One of those waves came in 1952. They jailed a big farmer in almost every village and they used it as a deterring example for the other farmers. Nobody knew about the fate of the arrested farmers for at least a month. They used this time in order to visit the remaining farmers and pressure them to join. They would say: ‘look, it’s dangerous. We’re not to be blamed for it. They arrested one peasant because he failed to deliver in-kind to the state. This could happen to you, too. If you join the collective farms, you’ll have peace of mind’.”

“There was a burdensome duty of supplying the state with foodstuffs during the war. There were also a lot of dangerous things that we did, such as providing relatives with food. It was pretty much exacting to swap corn for flour or the like. But I was twenty years old then, so it wasn’t as tough for me because I didn’t fully realize and the dangers. I just didn’t take it all that seriously. It was more like an adventure for us, to go to the mill and illegally mill some grain. It was terribly dangerous but I didn’t take it too seriously.”