Jan Hanzlík

“Not to fulfil contributions was sabotage and there was a punishment for sabotage. My father was first imprisoned for a month at Christmas of 1952. He and Mr. Alois Bučil were in Pankrác Prison and they did nothing the whole month. They could not lie down on a pallet, they caught Mr. Bučil sitting on the pallet so they cut the father of six children bald. They spent their time hollowing out a chessboard in the wooden floor and playing checkers, making the pieces out of bread. It was worse the following year. They arrested dad in 1953 and imprisoned him during the harvest season, so he was imprisoned in August, for six weeks when he was supposed to harvest. However, the farmers came, and they helped us to thresh, so we somehow overcame it. What else I should say... The following year on 7 September 1954, a policeman came to our house and said that when dad came from the field, he should take his ID and military identity card and he should come to the police station. So when dad came from the field, he did not even eat and went there. And he did not return for a long time, so our mum sent us to look where he was. Well and Mrs. Šedivá who lived in front of the police station told us to send mum to see her. Well, and she told her that they had taken dad away.”

“The village of Milín was bombarded a lot. When I was little, burnt cars were standing by the road from Smolotely to Milín. And (there was) a lot of ammunition, when we were children, many of us would bring the belt to the machine gun, we [as boys] would throw it in cans, light some alcohol and throw it in and it would fire. There was a lot of ammunition everywhere after the war, in Milín forests and also in Smolotely forests. The boys would wear belts, burnt vehicles were standing there, and the plasters of the houses were blasted off from so-called strafers. You could tell that the war had been there.”

“I remember that in 1962 or 1961, they came to imprison a Mr. Vondrášek from Těchařovice and he was working with horses close to the village. A woman told him: ‘Mr. Vondrášek, policemen had arrived at your place.‘ And he knew what it was about, that they were going to arrest him, so he took the reins off the mare and hung himself. Back then, his funeral took place in Chraštice, which is about three kilometres far from Ohař, so we went there, I do not know if we were two or three in the horse-drawn carriage and my father let us sleep in the carriage. But at the funeral, it was a farmers´ demonstration. The village of Chraštice was full of horse carriages, roadsters, it was a silent protest.”