Jaromír Petlach

“‘Let’s plough away the borders between fields!’ They were all overly enthusiastic about it. The cooperative in Slušovice began operating. Slušovice was a model cooperative, with a chairman who had all resources at his disposal and all the support he needed. They wanted to establish the same system in all the other cooperatives, whether the conditions there were suitable for it or not. They wanted to have cooperatives everywhere and unite all farmers. They were persuading them one by one. The local officials did not have the skills to persuade somebody. Therefore they sent in some specially trained commissioners from Brno. These officials were calling on the individual farmers in the region, holding talks with them and persuading us how great things would be. If you remain an individual farmer, you will have high delivery quotas. Your work will be difficult. Just look at the cooperative in Slušovice; just like them, you will own everything collectively, and you will enjoy wonderful life. All the work will be mechanized and everything will be great. But it was not so easy. Each farmer had his little plot of land and they were used to working on it in their own way. But now the officials were persuading us to join all the fields together. Fine, so we shall share the fields. It took one year; I don’t remember if it was in 1957 or 1958. But they eventually began to force the farmers… there was certain pressure. They threatened them and the farmers were afraid. They were considering all the possibilities and fearing what might happen to them. The older farmers began to hesitate, they were uncertain, and they started joining the unified cooperatives. The first members of the cooperative basically did not have anything, but they did sign up to join the cooperatives and expected to work there. The farmers were waiting to see what the other farmers would do and who of them would sign it. They would bring you a document to sign - you had to sign an agreement with joining the cooperative. Farmers around us began signing it, too, and father then… We were sitting here and he was not sure whether… Then it all began… the pressure became really intense. They even took one farmer – I don’t remember his name any more – to Brno; there was a lot in stake, and it was not easy. One by one they were signing it, although with troubled hearts… I can still see the father, his hand shaking when he was signing the document. ‘To sign it for the cooperative!’ It is as if he had signed his death warrant.”

“A great disaster happened at the end of September: there was the mobilisation (on 23rd September 1938 – auth.’s note). Mobilisation of all men up to forty years of age. There was a regular draft, and it worked the same way as it had been until recently. Every man was registered. My father was a soldier as well, he had his military ID. I think it was general Syrový who declared the mobilisation – it was announced in the evening, I believe. It was declared for every soldier or reserve soldiers up to forty years of age. My father was born in 1900, and he was thus thirty-eight years old, and he had to go to the army. We had horses at home. My sister was three years old; she was nine years younger than me. Our mother remained alone. There was no other way, and so the village administration office issued a note for me, confirming that my father had to join the army and that I was thus released from the classes. Therefore I did not go to school and I stayed at home instead and we sowed the fields as usual. I did agricultural work. Mom had cattle there. There was an awful lot of work. Fortunately – and unfortunately as well – it did not last long. That was because the political matters, all these agreements with Hitler and France and England, advanced so quickly, and an agreement was reached that our country would cede its border regions to Germany. It all progressed that way. It had been already agreed before. There was noting else to do. It was a tumultuous time and everyone wanted to take part in some way and fight against the Germans somehow. At school, we started wearing badges WE SHALL NOT SURRENDER! We shall fight somehow. We established a kind of a committee in the class, and we appointed a chairman and we planned that we would do some underground activity. We were fourteen or fifteen-year-old boys, and it would have been really bad for us. Our teachers tried to calm us down, because they saw where it was heading to and that all our effort to help and to fight was in vain. There was no chance to do anything at all… Although in the whole nation, the determination to do something was enormous; at that time all the people were really willing to give everything in order to defend their republic.”

“The horses became no longer needed. They were in stables; everyone had some horses. They needed to be fed and cared for, and all this cost money. The number of horses was thus being reduced. My father was already quite old, and there were younger people. Only some pairs of horses had been left here. The committee decided that our horses would have to go. We had two horses. We were to put them away. But what do they mean, putting away a horse? It is not so easy… My father arranged it with a slaughterhouse, and one day in the morning he got up and readied the horses and we said good-bye to them and father walked them to Brno. He brought the two horses to the slaughterhouse, he handed them over to, well, to be killed, and then he returned home. We were sad about it, of course, because the horses had been part of our family. But that was the way it happened, and nothing could be done about it; it was a part of the collectivization process.”