“Dad was connected with the group of Mašín – Balabán – Morávek, and our fields were to be the used for Operation Benjamin. That was the landing of one paratrooper. Dad knew Colonel Mašín, who had torches hidden at our house. The landing was to have taken place in the night. Each day it was to happen, Dad made a round of the area, our lands, where the landing was to take place, to check if the Germans had set up a station there or were guarding the area or something...”
“First, by some decree they took our fields that were more than fifty hectares. We had something over a hundred hectares, so they took that. Then one time in the spring they came up from the tractor station, and they put some numbers on all our machines, such as the tractors, the thresher, and many others, and then they left. We continued to use the machines like they were ours, because they were ours, and then in the autumn, after the harvest, they took all the machines away. Towards the end of the year Dad suddenly received a bill for using ‘their’ machines. Dad said: ‘But those were our machines, you just stuck some numbers on them.’ They denied it, and we had to pay them rent.”
“When Mašín was arrested and wounded, they published a big article in the newspapers with a precise description. They asked for people who could identify Mašín who, as they wrote, was in a state of unconsciousness I think. Back then we were worried stiff whether one of our employees - we had twenty to thirty of them at the time - not out of spite, but if they might not say: ‘Oh yeah, we saw him in Bříství, he was at the Žerts’ place.’ But luckily it worked out okay.”
Zdeněk Žert was born on 6 December 1922 in Bříství near Kolín. He comes from an old farming family that traces its roots back to the seventeenth century. His father Karel and his mother Emilie (née Raková) had a large farm with more than a hundred hectares of land. Zdeněk had a three years younger sister Danuše. The Žerts showed great courage during the war on a number of occasions. They supplied families persecuted by the Nazis with food from their farm for free, Karel Žert worked with the resistance group The Three Kings, specifically, with Josef Mašín during Operation Benjamin, when a paratrooper called Riedl was supposed to make a drop on the Žerts‘ grounds. He also cooperated with the military guerilla Antonín Pavlík. After the war the Communists gradually confiscated the Žerts‘ lands, machinery, and even the very house they lived in. They deported them from Bříství to Černošice, where the witness‘s parents remained until their death. Zdeněk Žert was fortunate enough to have completed a university course in agriculture before 1948, when the Communists came to power - as the son of a „kulak“, he would have been barred from studying even at grammar school. After the revolution in November 1989, the Žerts finally received their property back in restitution. Zdeněk Žert Jr returned to the family estate in Bříství with his wife Alice, and together they built up several thriving orchards.
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