Antonín Konečný

"I believe there were a lot of people who were set on me and tried to hurt me in some way. I can tell you such incidents that when I was harvesting for people with a combine harvester, I took a hundred crowns for a patch. He gave me the money, got on his bicycle and rode to the municipality to denounce me for taking a hundred crowns, and if I could take that much and if I paid the carriage tax on it, and they had such talk. The women in the village told me, they knew my mother very well, we got on very well together, so I found out all this. The next year I went again to do the harvest for him, but I took 150 crowns to let him know."

"When I was leaving school I had a contract to go to Strážnice to an agricultural secondary school. I already had everything signed, the papers. My mother got some friends, so through the cooperative, I guess, Petrov for me, I would learn for that cooperative, that I would be a mechanic for them in time, but who knows. And a week before the end of the holidays I got a letter from the district committee of the Communist Party that they were stopping all my education. So the whole month of September I was at home. Then my mother told me again that I could go to the tractor factory in Veselí to learn. With the condition that I had to live there. In my first year, I had to live in a dormitory two kilometers from home. I tell you, when I got there at the beginning of October, the headmaster let all the apprentices in. He let me out of the line and for about ten minutes he told me that I was the son of a kulak and how he had to re-educate me. Several times during that apprenticeship he called me into the headmaster's office. Maybe every six months. He spent an hour convincing me not to help my parents, to rub themselves down. He tried to influence me somehow. How do I put this... By then, I understood it all, the way life is. I felt sorry for some of these people, how they made fools of themselves."

"I'll tell you later. In the sixth grade we started taking Russian. I told the Russian teacher that I wasn't going to learn Russian, that she should accept it. So she threatened me that I would fail. I'm gonna fail. Then she went along with it, and instead of Russian, I did my math homework. My grades weren't too bad. I was very good at math. She got used to it. When the inspector came, she gave me an excuse: 'Tonda, don't come to school for two days so that I don't get kicked out of the school system because you don't know Russian.' She would give me a four in maths, I had the worst grade, so I could just pass and be done with it. She put up with it. It was quite good. But there were teachers who fought against me. In third or fourth grade, we had to draw what we wanted to do in life. They all drew rockets and tanks. I drew a wagon with horses, riding horses. I'm sixty-four years old, none of them are astronauts, and I ride horses all the time. That's when my mother had to go to school. Because they only dealt with it in the headmaster's office in Veselí, that I was being brought up against socialism."