Josef Havránek

"Well, what happened on the twenty-sixth was that suddenly a meeting of the pupils was called. – I need to have a rest. - So at the pupils' assembly there was a worker, some communist worker at the vocational school, or whoever it was, spoke out. He said that our pupil here, Josef Havránek, is the son of an enemy of the state, and that's why we're expelling him from the vocational school. Well, that was a shock to me. I was a small boy, 16 years old, and I was as big as I am now, 160 centimetres, not a strong guy. I got already so stressed that tears started running. Well, it was terrible. I was completely broken down. Well, when it was all over, those tears - they weren't child´s tears, they were tears of the injustice that I felt as a boy."

"But he still didn't want to join, he thought that he could get away with it, that it was impossible. But they brainwashed him in such a kind-hearted way until three o'clock in the morning, and he told them at three o'clock in the morning: 'I won't enter anyway!' But they told him, 'Mr. Havránek, we'll give you time until nine o'clock, think it over properly.' And Dad was unhappy about that because the consequences would be terrible. It wasn't like he could keep farming, he wouldn´t be able to farm at all. Well, in the morning he got up and went and signed. So it was just a voluntarily forced signature to join the cooperative farm (JZD)."

"My mother got a letter from that machine tractor station which, as I mentioned, had been set up on our farm. They were not asking, but, 'We urge you to sell us your half of property number 4 because it is still in your possession.' And we all kept saying that, but they [the communists] didn't follow any laws. And suddenly it was discovered that there was a certain limit in the land registry that could not be falsely overwritten. It turned out that the property was still written in my mother's name, as she had acquired it when she got married, and that was still effective. Everyone was at a loss as to what to do about it. My father had already had the surgery and he was completely drained of energy. Well, it was hard. So we came to the hearing in Roudnice nad Labem, to some office, and there we were treated like our father in court. In the same way. My mother kept asking if she was going to get any higher compensation because she thought - what they were offering her was 20,000 crowns for the whole farm - so she thought it was disproportionate to what they were going to buy, what they were offering. Well, but my mother was still hesitating. I said, 'Don't sell it.' So they started at us, 'Mrs. Havránková, think carefully, because you might end up like your husband.' It meant she would be sentenced and imprisoned. And my mother couldn't stand it anymore and she signed. Those were the times, you see. It was terrible. It was a time without freedom, time of oppression, disregard for the law, and revenge and causing harm."