Zdeněk Brožek

"What was the condition of the farm? Well, our farm, I can't say that it was somehow devastated. We used the barn, there was just one cow, they left it to us, or to our parents. So actually we had that one cow all the time , the milk and the cottage cheese. Apart from the fact that we had nothing, the machines that grandfather gave to the cooperative were not there, the fields were in a poor condition. Grandfather had a beautiful avenue of plums and so on, all that was pulled out. The field was one big area plowed down the hill, so there was a huge erosion of the soil below. The first thing I did was take... Because right after the revolution, it was crazy to take everything and work the nine with your bare hands hectares, that was not possible. And at that time the restitutions were such that the comrades did everything possible so that they did not have to give us anything. It was terribly time-consuming. At that time, they took it from my grandfather in one day, I have proof of it here, and it took me four years before they gave me anything back. But the first thing I did was taking that field down there where the erosion was the greatest, there really, it was taking the bank there, the soil was literally draining away there. So we took it there, we grassed it there, we strengthened it there. Well, we gradually acquired mechanization, so I bought the plots and we gradually started farming like that."

"I wasn't a Scout, unfortunately I was a Pioneer. At that time, it was the 60s, it was still a rigid communist regime, and our teacher was from a family where it was done that way. That's how it was back then. So we were, how it was called Sparkles, we wore some kind of badge. Then we were promoted to pioneers, we wore pioneer scarves. It was such a split because they told me something at school, then I came home and dad, not that he laughed at me at all, but he kind of hinted to me that he didn't like wearing scarves and stuff like that. It's just that we were six or seven years old at the time, so we were a little confused about it, we didn't know what was going on."