Bohuslav Rodovský

“The minority cooperative meanwhile disintegrated. Over ten hectares were returned to my mother. It was done in order to get high deliveries from us again. I didn’t want to do it but they threatened me that they would not release me if I did not sign my agreement that I would return to work in agriculture. I had to do it, just like the others. I came home after Christmas, at the beginning of January 1955. But there was nothing there; everything had been stolen. And I was expected to farm there! About two days later, a black mare came there by itself. That was the beginning of my farm work.”

“It meant that we had to get up at three or half past three in the morning and feed the cattle. Then we went to get fodder and work in the field. We would arrive home at five in the evening and go immediately to the stable. We had forty-five heads of cattle and six horses. We needed to clean their stables. I haven’t even gotten out of the house. I don’t even know how to drink beer. I admire my mother that she managed to put up with all that.”

“We were so enthusiast after the Velvet Revolution, but then we became quite disappointed. When they were to return our property to us, or when we asked somebody to testify for us about the damage that had been done to us, people were avoiding us and they were afraid of us. Some people even refused to sign a testimony for us that we had owned that property. Some people even spoke against us and they created a pamphlet where they wrote that we had not had any property at all. This pamphlet was signed here in the village even by people who had not lived here at all at that time! We were then made to look as if we were liars who claimed something to which we had no right.”

“We shared all the problems of the members of Auxiliary Technical Battalions. They were shouting at us that we came there to atone for the crimes which our parents had done to the working class. They used maxims like: ‘If you fall, we will not raise you, but we will trod you even deeper into the ground.’ But we were young guys and we didn’t even realize that too much. Only later we realized that it was no fun, that they basically did not consider us to be humans.”