Libuše Janyšová

“They did air raids here towards the end of the war, and we had so-called strafers flying in here. Those were Americans who flew in fighter planes and mostly blew up trains. I was visiting at the time, she lived on a farm in Horky, which is just a bit off from Čáslav, on the line from Čáslav to Havlíčkův Brod, the main line. They had a barn right by the railway. I was there for the mid-term holidays. And suddenly everyone started shouting: The strafers are coming. And we all stood in the yard like dolts, we gaped at them, and we reckoned we saw blacks. It’s possible, there were blacks as well and they flew low. There was a munitions train there, which they shot to bits. And instead of hiding, we just looked on. So I experienced this moment, when the strafers made a hit on the munitions train. Then sometime in the middle of the war I experienced - when I was at my aunt’s in Kolín, during the spring holidays. And my aunt lived in Vinice, and there were just fields all around and then Koramo beyond. It was called Petrolka during the war. And Petrolka was a strategic point for the Allies of course, for them to blow it up. I was there for the holidays, and my cousin Libuška was there, she was two years older. And suddenly my uncle came running up: Come have a look, something’s up! And just imagine, everyone rushed out in to the street, and you could see across the field how something fell out of each aircraft, and the whole of Petrolka was alight. Back then it was Sendražice, now it’s a part of Kolín. Those were the Americans, who took pictures of it. Those were flash bomb, and they illuminated the place, took photos of it, and then bombed it a few days or weeks later.”

“Suddenly this one Manča got in there and was chairlady for about half a year, until they saw how dumb and stupid she was. Then they ousted her themselves, because she could yell all right, so she got in there, they elected her, and then they kicked her out again. It was the time of those loud-mouthed yellers. Those were those kind of Communist tribunes. If he could yell and learn something out of Rudé právo [Red Law, the main Communist newspaper - trans.], he kept yelling about it. It was very bad. But I’ll tell you that my cousin and aunt were among the first to join the co-op. Well, they all joined pretty much at the same time. But because they were beat up, constantly in debt, and they solved one trouble with another. They delivered the eggs but not the milk, they didn’t deliver the corn, there was always something. And they could see how the animals suffered. They couldn’t tend to the field properly, just the three of them. Auntie Žofinka was bent double, seeing to the pigs, the poor mite, carrying those buckets to the pigsty. Milan had horses, he was a young boy, about 22 years old, and auntie also had to care for the cows. And now they were supposed to work the field - how? So they joined the co-op. It was horrifying when the Communists took away their horses and collected the cows in the cowshed. The horses, that was horrible. The farmers or boys who loved them, they... it was horrible. Because [the Communists] took them to the slaughter because they kept yelling about how they’d have tractors. And then autumn came, the beet, it rained, and where was their tractor? In trouble, because they couldn’t get through the mud. And they took the horses to the slaughter, the cows too. It was really awful, those were such dreadful times! And I tell you, they didn’t just hurt people but animals too.”