Josef Směšný

"Dad was with Vaca, mum with Hudec. The peasants basically paid them nothing. I think they more or less kept them in poverty so that they were basically working for them for free. They could sleep there. My dad as a stable boy slept in a chamber somewhere by the horses, or even in the stable by the horses, and my mom as a maid had some sort of black chamber, black kitchen it was called, where she could somehow live and be in that little world. At the moment when the stable boy and the maiden got married, they could no longer be stable boy or maiden with that farmer, they couldn't be part of that family. At that time, they were generally called podruzi in Bohemia, and everywhere in Haná, they were known as hofeři. They lived in a small hoffer room or cottage, with the whole family, including children, crammed into a single space. They had to provide for themselves and, in exchange for the room from the farmer, they had to work for him. Of course, they could also work for someone else—wherever there was work available—but they had to sustain themselves; no one supported them back then."

"It was really hard during the First Republic. My dad, when he and my mom got married, his only desire was to build a house and have a farm. He knew from his experience in the First Republic, when a lot of people died, that either he was going to make a living and have a place to live or he was going to die, it was just the way the times were. So my dad started building a house in the fifties and of course he wanted the pigsties there. But in the fifties, the party and the government didn't allow him to do that anymore, what about the pigsties, everybody would go to the cooperative, nobody would farm privately. So after about seven years he sold the house he had built and in 1957 we moved into the present house. My father used to go there to some Vlčeks, they were his friends. The old Mr. Vlček died and the young one, Mitek Vlček, had some problems with the regime, so he ran away. My dad bought the house from them because it was a pigsty. That was his vision, he would have a cow, it would give him milk, meat, he would have a place to live and he wouldn't starve, because a lot of people were dying during the First Republic."