František Škuthan

"When I told how they took him into custody, they told him to take the car so he could come back. But my dad did not come back, they locked him up. The car was in the possession of the first director of the tractor station in Louny, some Pauš. But about a year later they started to allocate and produce Tudors, so the tractor station director got a voucher for a new Tudor. And our Praga Super Piccolo, engine one thousand six hundred, they cut it off behind the back seats, made a van body, and the buyer got it, some Lála Lapka from Ročov, he worked as a buyer all his life in the tractor station. Then when my father came back from prison, he was a troublemaker, he was not afraid, he did not want to give himself up. So, he found a reasonable guy at the Ministry of State Control, there was a Ministry of State Control during the communism era. He complained that they took away not only the tractor – taking away a tractor was in accordance with the laws at that time, he could not do anything, but the cars were a matter of personal property. It was not a means of agricultural production. So, they took it from us illegally and they had to give us the car back. But they did not have it anymore because they cut it off and made a van out of it. Well, they got an order from the Ministry of State Control that they had to give the car back to Škutchan that they had taken it from him illegally. That was a disgrace for the communists in the district city. So, they always came with some car, and my father checked the detailed vehicle registration certificate, and when he found out the car was stolen, he threw them out. He threw them out twice like that because they had taken the car from someone. When they came the third time, they said they would not give us another one because my father was making trouble and did not really want it. He found in the vehicle registration certificate that it belonged to a doctor from Louny, who was Jewish and whom the Germans had destroyed in the concentration camp. So, we had a Praga Lady."

"Dad had a hard time getting himself a tractor, we had a new LanzBulldog 35, it was a beautiful tractor. And they came to take that away from us right away in February in 1950. They came back a week later saying that dad had not given them the belts. They had not asked for them and he did not have them on the thresher. So, they arrested him a week later and took the belts. And we did not see him again for about a year. Mom wrote to them, begged them to let him go, to keep him locked up over the winter. The way I saw it, I was at home toiling with mom. My brother was at the eight-year high school in Louny."