"My mother could not find any work for at least a year, if not two or three years. Then she started working in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD). First, she worked in crop production, but it was miserable and she earned very little, a crown or two per day. I don’t know exactly but it was very little money. And she learned to steal, which she´d never done before. So that was the only thing she got out of that crop production work. Then she went to animal production, she was a milkmaid. Nobody wanted to do that. First, she worked at the Nevařil farm, not far from us, and she quite liked it there. Then they built a new cow barn at Ohrádka and it was very hard for one shift. I don't know if you're familiar with that cow barn, but there wasn't any mechanization except the manure grooves. People worked really hard there. My mother would get up at about 2:30 am, go to the cow barn, come back at 6:30 am to get us ready for school. Then she would leave around 4:00 pm, and come back again at 6:30 pm. It was really hard work. Eventually it made her ill and she died at the age of 64."
"I had only two Bs in Czech and Russian on my school report but the headmaster Ruda didn´t want me to study further. He insisted that I went into agriculture or work manually somewhere, since I was the son of a kulak. Eventually they let me to apply to the secondary agricultural school, I can't remember which one exactly, it was south of Prague in the Beroun region. But I wasn't accepted anyway, for who I was."
"There were seven farmers in Zásmuky, but we were the only ones who got evicted. I think it was because of Mrs. Ulíková. She worked for my grandfather in the summer in the 1930s, and then during the war, in about 1944, she came back, holding one child by the hand and the other in her arms. She came with her husband who had tuberculosis. My parents got married in 1941 and they couldn't have children for a long time. So my mother felt for the kids and she decided to take the family in. They were also a great help as our family had no helpers. Everything was handled by my grandparents and parents. And my grandfather was getting old, so they took the family in. Back then my parents bought a communal house that was in front of our farm. There were two entrances, four rooms in each entrance. Some people lived in the back part of the house, and the Ulík family moved in the front part with four rooms. But my parents would certainly have found some other helpers in Zásmuky. But they decided to take the Ulík family in, out of compassion. But in 1948, Mrs. Ulíková became an ardent communist, and she kept complaining about our family at every meeting, accusing us of exploitation. Eventually she succeeded in getting us moved out of our farm.
Bohuslav Holub was born on 16 February 1947 into a traditional farming family in Zásmuky in the Kolín region. His father, Karel Holub, was arrested for not fulfilling absurdly excessive agricultural deliveries. In 1951, the communists nationalized their farm and moved them to their grandfather’s. The family faced persecution and condemnation not only from Communist Party members but also from their neighbours. His father had to join the auxiliary technical battalions. He spent the entire military service in the mines in the Ostrava region. His mother Marie Holubová could not find any work for several years. Then she was employed as a milkmaid in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD), and although she later became seriously ill, they refused to let her retire on a disability pension. Bohuslav was born with a congenital hip defect. In spite of his family situation and his health problems, he managed to graduate from secondary agricultural school and later from agricultural university. In 1969, as a student, he organized a mass for Jan Palach in the castle church in Lány. He worked as a zootechnician and economist in the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD). In 1977 he joined the Communist Party for work reasons. After the Velvet Revolution he entered a new phase of his life in banking. He and his brother Karel acquired nationalized property in restitution, unfortunately in a very poor condition. In 2022, Bohuslav Holub lived in his house in Oleška near Český Brod.
