Jaroslav Zářecký

“I graduated primary school in 1953 and in 1956 I was supposed to start my apprenticeship at an agricultural school in Kostelec. My mother used to say: ‘Well, you should go, we’ll make it work somehow.’ So, I started and went to the opening day. That first day the leadership had a lecture in the main auditorium and at that moment I heard… They called me out to the hall and the principal told me that he had received an order from Žamberk that my education there was undesirable and that I should go home. So from the opening day I had to go straight home. And that was it for my studies.”

“Hay was harvested, it was even dried by hand, it was made into haystacks and taken away. That was a lot of work. Then the harvesting itself – sheaves, threshing, that too was a lot of work. Then more work in the summer, when we started growing cauliflower and lettuce. Everything had to be accurate, so that the cauliflower wouldn’t be overripe or the lettuce too bad. We started at 4 a.m., prepared it for transportation, at six I went to Žamberk with the cauliflowers, my brother was in the cowshed, milking cows and feeding them. Our mother did the same – pigs in the pigsty, that was all on the farm. Then when I came back, I went to the field. I ate a little something and went to the field. In spring it was either seeding or plowing. Our neighbor plowed with a horse and a cow, for example, you don’t see that anymore. Or someone only took the cows to the field. Today you can only see that in some old movies. So, I went to the field and plowed until the evening. The horses had to eat and drink at noon, then I continued. There was of course work in the cowshed. There was always something to do.”

“The first wave of collectivization was in 1951 - that’s when the communists achieved to incorporate around 200 or 300 ha of land and their owners into an agricultural collective. But it gradually fell apart. The second wave was in 1959 and that’s when the real pressure was put on us, in the sense that if we didn’t join the collective farm, our land would be expropriated and we would get some land on the outskirts, where the farm didn’t need it – some slopes and peaks. So it was clear that that wasn’t possible, because we couldn’t do that. We discussed it with my mum and said: ‘There’s nothing we can do, we have to join the collective farm.’ So we all ended up there, in the collective farm, in 1959.”

“Eventually they came for him unannounced in 1953. The State Security agents occupied the farm. They threw everything we had in the bedroom and living room out on a big pile. They were looking for some documents they could use to discredit him. They even threw out everything from the bed. They made an inventory of his clothes. They also took some of the documents they thought they could use. They made an inventory of all the animals, that is of cows, pigs, sheep, chicken. And father had to go with them. They took him and he didn’t come back and was locked up in Žamberk in solitary confinement. At the district national committee – that’s where the court was at that time – and he was locked up there in solitary confinement for a month. And they kept looking for something to discredit him with. The agents drove around Kunvald pumping people and trying to find someone who would testify against him. But they didn’t succeed, no one said anything. That didn’t work out, so after that they took him to the Pankrác jail in Prague. He was there for the following nine months. And they still kept looking for something to pin on him. And then there was the trial. On April 9, 1954 there was a trial in Hradec Králové.”

“A directive came, and we had to hand in the tractor, I remember that, it was February 1950, we had to take it there with Klement. He drove and I was with him and we even argued about who was going to drive. And we drove it to Žamberk, us two boys, to the courtyard of the Žamberk castle. We handed the tractor over and that was the end of it. The tractor was gone and the tools were gone as well. Then about a month later, it was in the wintertime, we learned that in Králíky someone had left water inside of it and that severe frosts had come and had torn it apart and that was the end of the Bulldog.”