“We had a swine and it had seven little piglets. And they came from Slemeno, I don’t remember who anymore, and said: ‚Oh well, they have piglets here and not announced!‘ And they came to check and said: ‚So you got unannounced piglets.‘ And I replied: ‚I do, everything is [all right].‘ And I said to my husband: ‚Pepo, take a motorbike and go to Slemeno, so that the policeman can see it is ok.‘ They came under the hill and he [secret policeman – author´s note] said: ‚Come on, let’s go.‘ And he drove on and the locked him up and didn’t let him go. And then two of them came here, a miller and some Dostálek. Here we got a table, so they sat down, so I would sit opposite to them, to tell the truth. And I said: ‚So that my truth is not a lie and your lie the truth‘ and stayed just where I wanted. And the miller, he was quite ok, said: ‚Sign it up!‘ I said: ‚I will not sign, as if I write, I sign, so it will be one more missing.‘”
“Or we were at the meadow, here they went to the granary alone, took all the grains, left nothing. Now we needed some for the cattle... So my husband went, it was Wednesday, he went to Rychnova and in front of the hotel Havel a hotel owner stood and said, that yesterday they came here from Prague, and it happened that they took all the grain to sow, everything, and they judged it, it should not have happened. So in order to be able to sow, we had to normally buy the corn! They issued a voucher for it... And then also once we were flailing and we wanted to hide some grain, so we had sheaf, it was all empty, so there chaff was blown. So we hid a couple of sacks there. And they had some kind of bayonets or whatnot, they came from Kvasiny, from the factory, four of them I think, they were here and pricking it and totally happy they found our grain!”
Anna Čepelová was born on 25 April, 1924 in Slemeno as a daughter of the husbands Veverka, owning a farm near Rychnov nad Kněžnou. The father of her father, Václav, was long employed at the estate of the count Kolowrat as a deputation (bailiff) and he got the farm as surrenders during the land reform. Witness´ father got the farm in quite a debt and the next generation had to deal with a large historical disfavour. After 1948 the parents were pronounced gulags and since then faced continuous pressure following from overall state policy against private farmers; yet the legislative regulations were even enhanced by bullying on part of the local authorities. Gradually parents lost their agricultural technical equipment and finally had to hand over the whole farm to the state cooperative. But the persecution was not over yet. As employees of the state farm they have been still accused of mishandling of entrusted property. In 1991 the husbands got their farm back after an exhausting fight but in a totally poor condition. The renewal was actively handled by both the son and daughter of Čepela husbands, so todays almost idyllic form of the farm does not indicate at all what kinds of troubles it had to get through.
