“They began plowing the field and there were pioneers and member of the Socialist Youth Movement. I still remember a poem, which they told or shouted: ‚Will shall plow all the country lanes, a gulag is already carried in his coffin.‘ I know that women were standing there, who had their small pieces of field there, were crying, but to no avail. Yet it took two years, but it was very poor, only eight crowns for a unit. And those were so tough that in a day not even one was done. So it was eight crowns a day, but they would give us only four. And the four crowns left only later, it was always in January or February, if it all counted well together. And when it didn’t, we got nothing.”
“So I helped them (parents – editor´s note) later, but they didn’t get through it anyway. All of them had to go back to the agriculture coop as they changed their field. And again did it to bankrupt them, so that they didn’t farm their own. So the good field was left with the coop and they gave them a piece in the mountains or amongst the woods, where nothing grew, simply to destroy them. They had to deliver a lot, so of course they could not cope and went back. So as I said, they got four crowns a day. Eight per unit, four paid later, if everything went well.”
“Granny got for her wedding a dinning set. That was quite a luxury. In the decision you can read all the details: a soup bowl, a dumpling bowl and a sauce boat. It was all a single set. But they wanted to show all they had, how rich the farmer were. She stored it in a hay basket so that it would not crush and already loaded in a car. And then a communist Fillipi came there and said: ‚Mářa, we will need the basket, you need to leave it here.”
Vlasta Ehrenbergerová was born on 16 February, 1940 in a village of Telecí no. 16 in an agriculture family Roušar. She attended elementary and secondary school in hernative village. In 1950s she witnessed forced collectivisation, which afflicted her parents as well as her future husband, Josef Ehrenberger´s family. Her father-in-law, Josef Ehrenberger senior, was sentenced as a gulag and he and his family were violently evicted from their farm in the village of Telecí and went to Mácha’s lake to, so called, Sun court. Due to forced collectivisation and also her parents’ existential issues, she was forced to heavy labour at the age of 16 years in the forests administration, and later in the Riesen mountains at the Světlanka cottage. In 1962 she married Jan Ehrenberger in Svitavy, who died in 1999. She retired in 1997 and currently lives in a village of Sádek near Polička with her family and grandchildren.
