“We were exhausted like horses, at night it was impossible to sleep due to the hurting arms, how we were… And now the fear, always the fear that we wouldn´t fulfil the delivery, that they would come. My Dad was hiding, so that we had something to sow, in autumn winter corns are sown, rye and wheat, thus so that they wouldn’t take away even the seedlings. Now the fear of the agent of the buy-out, who came with the policeman and the chairman of the Czechoslovak Communist Party or somebody and they were creeping through the house and searching. For a found sack there was prison and ejection. Nobody can imagine that, such a quiet horror hanging always above us.”
“And they broke him down on the thing that he was very ill, actually from his youth, he was trying to overcome it by all his might to keep the farm going, and at that time they were threatening him that if he didn´t sign the entry into the cooperative, the application, that they would lock him up and his sons-in-law, my husband and the husband of the middle daughter would simply go to the mines. And because my husband had also feeble health, so my Dad signed it at that time. Anyway it was not possible to do anything, at least in our region. Somewhere private farmers kept up, but not in our place.”
“The village was in my opinion in 1948 or in 1950s liquidated as such an imagination of the ideal of a solidarity life, true-heartedness, fair play and handshake, and that was valid. Everything disappeared and the era of looking for more profitable places, higher earnings started, such a… It was no problem any more to see through…, to solve something rightly. Why? Once it was profitable to do it this way.”
“I know, I got to know only later that my Dad came home often nearly in the morning, because they had the meetings or other activities, whatever… There in Jaroměřice region weapons were really thrown down and in addition, Jitka Kubišová served in our house, she was the sister of Jan Kubiš, they came to collect her. Mum´s brother in the neighbour village, he was harbouring a parachutist, so they took the whole house, my grandmother, grandfather, uncle, all ended up in a concentration camp. Jitka was taken as well, she was also in a concentration camp. My uncle was beheaded by an axe in Pankrác and my grandmother and grandfather perished in the concentration camp. Thus we feared the day when they would come to take us too, because if my uncle had said anything about the resistance, my Dad would have gone too. And after the war such a relief that it finally was… the fear of the Germans fell off us, well, and the red terror started! It started again!”
“The ones who were hanged, most of them worked in the partisan group Lenka-Jih during the war and they had weapons thrown down from the West and the weapons were hidden and really the resistance against the communism after 1948 was great there, and it was really believed that if the resistance arose, the West would come to help us. The secret agents knew that, the communists, and that´s why they actually provoked this reaction of the people. They were even encouraging them: ´Yes, you have to,´ the agents who were put there.”
“They were ruling like feudalists, as my sister who was getting married, had to sign to the cooperative, it was in 1960s already, that she would stay in the cooperative and work there. Just to permit her to get married. It was just, it was a rarity for me at that time, I said to myself: ´It is a absolute middle age, when something like this can be still happening.´”
“This was again an invention of the communists, because they wanted mainly to break down the farmers, and actually by the toil, not only by the nonsensical deliveries which came then and which were absolutely impossible to fulfil, but with the purpose that there would be nobody to work in the farms and on the fields. The stable boys and servants who used to work earlier, were nowhere any more at that time in 1948, at least not in our region, and everything was done only by forces of the family. Now when actually the whole village was set against each other, at that time there existed already the action committees in which there were only comrades, and in the villages they had for instance ten different commissions. And all the commissions were again just comrades and all the time the people were getting the propaganda that these were their exploiters and a beautiful tomorrow was waiting for them because everything would belong to them together, but only when these reactionaries handed over their possessions, when the cooperative would be founded. The cooperatives, they started to talk about them straight in 1949.”
“Below our school there was near in the street a gym hall of Třebíč and in the hall one of the trials with the Babice people was held in November. It was with the farmers and the people provoked there to resistance by secret agents Vašek and Malý. Nine of the people from Babice were executed here in Jihlava. They were hanged. Among them were three priests and one of them, father Bula from Újezd, was sentenced… He was (imprisoned) first and surprisingly he was judged first with such a next court, not in July, when all the events happened and the execution took place then on 2nd and 3rd August. Then the next court was held in Třebíč in November, so I know that the horror in that region of the courts, it was in Budějovice, Znojmo, Brno, Třebíč… They locked up about 150 people. They are terrible fates. And we were just going from that school, we had already known that the court was held there, so we ran to watch the sentenced to be led away, and I know how they were walking in the parade, our villagers, father Bula was walking and showing so that he got the rope. He was the only one, the others got twenty five years and life imprisonment.”
“The cooperatives looked terribly in the beginning, because they were founded with people like tailors, shoemakers, postmen, teachers or such persons who had no idea about farming, and to get so… Then the cottagers joined them, but they still had too little, and when they already had a field, they again didn´t have any machines and buildings and any livestock production, any farm animals, thus it was necessary to get the farmers really there, to break them down, but it was all first in 1960s. They were taking them and at the same time throwing them out, it was such an oppressing politics. They needed everything from their farms, their knowledge, but they didn´t like them ideologically.”
“So I freed myself of the village then, but in reality I felt several times such even… I knew that I played somehow into those communists hands that I fled from the agriculture, but I had in my head only literature and my writing and I couldn´t… Then, when I was always listening to the laments during my visits at home, when they were reporting me what was all happening there and how it was going on there… My Dad went to the cooperative, he had to go, only in the beginning of 1960s, so he was very long, they carried it on privately. I was nearly ashamed that I was actually in the town and they were slaving there.”
They were pieces of land which nobody liked any more and the same was for animals. It became estranged from the people, they went to work there as to a factory
Ludmila Klukanová was born on 5th October 1936 in the family of a farmer Rudolf Šabata and his wife Růžena as the oldest of three sisters. Her family farmed for a few generations on an estate in Lipník near Hrotovice, the acreage of the fields was 18 hectares. Her parents were members of the agrarian party before the war. Her father participated in the resistance against the Nazis during the World War II, he was a member of the resistance group Lenka-Jih (South). After the war the whole family was very sceptical to the coming circumstances, also due to the fact that they didn´t have any illusions about the situation in the USSR. Their far relatives got namely in 1920 to Kazakhstan as a part of the action to help the Soviet industry, and thank to their experience the other relatives could create an imagination how the Soviet economy was working. Although there were no estates in the Vysočina region like there were for example in the Haná region, the farmers from there were still very hardly affected by the collectivization of agriculture. They were namely refusing to enter the agricultural cooperatives and they were being inflicted for their resistance by the liquidation deliveries of crop-plants and by repression. Besides, the Babice case bears relation to collectivization too. Ludmila Klukanová is today intensively engaged in studying of the time of the doom of the farm class, this theme blends also into her literary creation.
