Jaroslav Hrdina

"As this coup was getting near, or this revolution, my father would go to see what was going on. He did this on just this one occasion, or maybe there were few more, but unfortunately, there was this local man, who had been serving as some kind of an everseer, and he kept pestering him that he had no right to go there. and my father, he was a decent man, he didn't want trouble, so he would just walk around the farm and then he would just walk away." 

“Mom always said that the pay at the state farm was very low. When she wanted to buy bread the following day, or bread rolls, or let’s say butter for Sunday, she would go to the fields where part time workers, who were coming to us from factories, had worked. They were leaving behind empty bottles in the fields and field paths. She would go there and collect the bottles and in the evenings she would take a piece of blank paper and a pencil and calculate whether the bottles, they were mostly beer bottles, that she had collected would allow her to buy bread for us children, or butter - that was considered a feast. One can hardly believe today that there were conditions like this. My parents’ surname was Hrdina, meaning ‘Hero,’ and they were literally heroes, because what they achieved… and on top of that, two more siblings were born, so they had seven little children. Although we were already a bit older at that time. It really was a superhuman feat on their part and we will never be able to thank them enough for what they had done for us in those horrible conditions.”

“To put it simply, the political regime planned the delivery quotas in such a way that they were impossible to meet; it was unthinkable to be able to produce such an amount. When it was then not possible to meet the quotas, newspapers wrote about them as enemies of the regime, as those who cause damage and prevent the development of socialist agriculture. It even went so far that father was sent to the court in Lanškroun, which was a district town at that time, and he was sentenced to three months. Mom with us - five little children - had to keep the farm by herself, under brutal conditions, although some relatives tried to help us a bit. Unfortunately, the court sentence said that we had to be evicted, and it happened on June 12, 1953. Father thus got the unconditional sentence of three months of imprisonment, and he worked on the construction of some reservoir near Křižanov, near Seč. And when he returned we only had the most basic things, some clothes to wear... What happened was unique: I think that we were not even allowed to take a radio or a bicycle with us.”