They took us in an open car two hundred and fifty kilometers from home
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Jan Hrdina was born on August 28, 1942. His father Jan (1912–1991) had one of the largest farms in the village of Bystřec in Podorlice. Mother Marie (1920–2011) helped on the farm and, in addition to the eldest Jan, had six other children, born in 1945, 1947, 1949, 1951, 1955 and 1957. After 1948, the persecution of private farmers began. By prescribing excessive supplies that they could not meet, the Communist machinery gave rise to further restrictions. At the same time, they had nothing to live on. The Hrdinas were fined 40,000 crowns for failing to deliver agricultural supplies in 1951. On September 2, 1952, the witness’s father Jan Hrdina was sentenced by the Lanškroun District Court to three months in prison and another fine. Other landowners in Bystrac were similarly affected, and it was not just that. A few months later, the three largest peasants were exemplary punished by eviction from the village. The Hrdinas were evicted on June 12, 1953. Their property was taken over by the collective farm and they could take only the essentials. If their grandfather hadn’t brought four bags of flour with them, they would have nothing to eat. Overnight, the family with five children and a grandmother rode in open carts to the state farm Hluboká nad Vltavou, 250 kilometers away. There, the parents worked on a state farm and especially their mother did the hardest work. Jan, then 11, started going to school in his new home and sometimes struggled with teachers’ convictions. Because of his background, he and his six siblings could not study what they wanted. The Hrdinas settled in Zliva. Jan trained as a mechanic in Třeboň and from 1960 he worked as a repairer of agricultural machinery. In 1966, the family moved to Boharyn near Hradec Králové, but Jan soon returned to Zliva. In 1967, he married Růžena Buchtelíková and they had two children. Jan worked in a local factory for the production of fireclay goods. In 1968, he wrote a letter to senior positions about poor working conditions in the factory and was therefore labeled a rebel. The family farm in Bystřice was demolished in 1985, leaving only the exchanges that the family received in the 1990s. In 2021 he lived in Zliv and as a message to the young generation the witness mentioned the need to be educated and learn about their own history.
