Olga Havránková

“Before that, we could plant what we wanted to, that was the freedom we had. So we were quite humiliated by this. It was like there was a policeman watching over you, telling you what to do. My father was quite upset by it. My mother would conform to it somehow, but my mother also had no sympathy for collectivization. As there's nothing like freedom, after all.”

“Fortunately, my father had a motorcycle, which he bought after Germans confiscated his Harley. He bought a Jawa, so we could travel with him. He would take me to see my grandmother in the borderlands, for example. And I would be there maybe for a week and he would come to pick me up, as it was already harvest time: 'You have to come back home now, you have to help us.' And every time, I would cry. Or I had this trouble with my gallbladder and I ended up in a hospital, I was just fourteen-years-old and I ended up in a hospital – they kept me there for a week – and when I came back, my parents were thrashing the grain. And my mother said: 'Hurry up, come one, I've been waiting for you to come.' If she would say something like: 'You are home already, how nice of you...' But it was nothing like that. My mother was nice to us, but if there was work to be done... Hard work was something she was used to, so she expected the same from us.”