PhDr. Stanislav Hlava

"In Poland, sixty percent were private farmers. We had about one percent. And there were such farmers whose lands could not be used. They were sloping, stony, near the forest and so on - so they left them alone. But in Poland, I say, sixty percent were private farmers. In East Germany, self-employed people could employ five other workers. It was not possible in our country. As I said to one communist, 'After all, Marx proclaimed: We will eliminate exploitation — and who was exploited by a tradesman, a craftsman who worked alone, that you had to destroy him?' So, he owed me the answer because he couldn't answer it clearly." - "I think this is a very important topic, that it had harder parameters in Czechoslovakia than in other states." - "There were private shops in Germany. There were private inns, there were private trades. We went there, to Germany, so we were - I once bought some salami myself in a private butcher shop." - "It was here in a very mild form…" - "No, actually. it was not here at all." - "Those professions, for example, a shoe repairman was not allowed to be here until 1989." There was a barber in our village, his son then joined the party, and when he joined the military service, they wrote 'a son of a private tradesman' in his report and he had to join Technical auxiliary battalion. And he was a barber, his dad! He just had a razor and a brush - those were the whole means of production."

"We are Catholics, yes. However, there was a great agitation in the village in the 1920, after the founding of the Czechoslovak Church. There was a great apostasy from the Catholic Church, and there was perhaps the same number of believers of the Czechoslovak faith as Catholics. And there were even fights for the church, which ended in a trial in Jičín. There was a violent intrusion into the church twice, once on December 26, 1920 and the second time on New Year's Eve. The agitators summoned the believers of the Czechoslovak Church from a wide area and forcibly tried to break into the church.”

“In the morning they were always waiting in front of the house until the door opened. When the house door was closed, they were waiting in front of the cowshed, and we needed to go there with the fodder and to take away the manure. They were thus waiting by the cowshed door and immediately started urging them to join the cooperative, but it was of no use. One farmer here had kept a copy of the communist Rudé Právo newspaper, with the article from 1947 where Gottwald promised: ‘We will not establish any kolkhozes in this country, I guarantee you this, and if somebody comes to you and urges you to join a kolkhoz, take a stick and chase him out.’ That had been written in the Rudé Právo newspaper and the farmer had kept the newspaper and showed it to these officials. But they told him: ‘Oh, it used to be like that back then when we needed the votes, but forget it now, the times have changed.’”

“It ended with political screening of students, and what was remarkable was that we were assessed by schoolmates with whom we had been on first-name terms and whom we knew from the volleyball team. Of course, the official propaganda proclaimed that only students who were notorious slackers would be dismissed. I was kicked out while I was in the fifth semester and when I had passed the state exam in Latin and I was getting ready for my examination in history. When I submitted an appeal against the decision - I sent it by registered mail just to be on the safe side - but they didn’t even bother to reply. They simply wanted to dismiss me, together with one more classmate who also lived here. They dismissed us both, because we didn’t keep quiet about the political situation and we spoke about it quite openly. We didn’t expect that something like this could happen, and then we found out that these two boys were actually secret communists, and so they eventually made it even worse for us during the screening.”

“Everybody had to have an employment at that time, and so I went to the labour office in Semily about a month later to apply for some job. There was a man about whom I later learnt that he was an honest person – later we even got on first-name terms and became friends – and he told me: ‘It is good that you came, we have already received a directive about how to employ you – you can work in a brick factory, lime works, in a mine, in a quarry, in road construction or in building construction.’ I knew one builder here in the village, and so I went to him and asked him if he would hire me. I worked for him as an assistant labourer for half a year and then I went to do my military service for two years.”