Vlasta Havlenová

“They applied pressure in other ways. They set how much grain, potatoes, milk you should deliver according to the number of hectares you had. You also had to hand in cattle, pigs, and eggs. There were quotas for how much you were to deliver based on the size of your farm. What that meant for my dad was that when he handed in the grain, potatoes, milk, they calculated that he hadn’t fulfilled one hundred per cent of his quota, only eighty per cent of it, and so he had to pay a fine. So the money he was to receive for the grain wasn’t paid out to him because they were blocked and were used to pay the fine. The situation was the the only income of my dad, aunt, brother, and sister, who still lived at home back then, was that aunt’s pension, because Dad didn’t receive any of the money at all. That was a bad state of affairs.”

“It was horrible for the children to have to sit on a stool by the hop plants from dawn till dusk. That would have been okay, we would have even kept them entertained, we even let them run around for a bit, but the accommodation was the worst. They stuck us up over a stable - the loft was clean, there were straw mattresses there, freshly made, some crates where the children could put their things on, the occasional hook in the beams to hang things from, but the entrance was the worst. You had to go up stairs with no railings. When a child needed the toilet in the night, it came to the open space of the stables. My husband and I didn’t sleep at all, and we took turns with our third colleague. The boys and girls were all in one room, of course, and there was always someone sitting by the entrance to make sure the children wouldn’t fall down.”