"When you were a private farmer during the socialist times, what was written in your ID card?" - "That was bad. Let me tell you a story. I went to the municipal authority and asked, 'Put a stamp in my ID card' because in those days you needed a stamp - 'employed' or 'not employed.' I came there and they said, 'You don't get that anywhere.' I said, 'I have an exit stamp from the Bohumín works but not an onboarding stamp from anywhere. If a policeman stops me, they will ask where I am employed.' They said, 'Answer it any way you want. We have no such stamp or anything like that here.'"
"Dad recalled how four or five people sat at the local national committee here in Hať, trying to talk him into doing it. Everyone was talking to him. He said one had such bright blue eyes and was hypnotising him. He said he was afraid to look at him, so he sat in this chair like I'm sitting in and pretended to be asleep. He didn't answer anything. Nothing. They kept talking to him. They were trying to catch onto every word against the politics. You say something and end up behind the bars for being against the state. He'd be dozing there and they'd be mad at him, 'Damn it, talk to us!' They put a pencil in his hand to sign it. But my dad didn't sign anything because he had bought the farm. He said, 'I'm not selling anything for a signature.' They said, 'We're not taking anything from you, it's still yours. You'll just farm it together.' They had a good idea, to farm bigger and cheaper in bulk. That's what they said. It was written in the shop windows. But my dad didn't sign it, so we still farmed privately."
"It was the worst in 1946-1947 when I went to school. We didn't understand the teachers and they didn't understand us. We spoke the "po naszymu" dialect but no Czech. Tough times. In school, there were three grades in one room divided by desks. The first row was the first grade, the second row was the second grade and the third row was the third grade. We were all taught by one teacher. He gave a 20-minute explanation to one grade. Then he gave them an assignment and spent 20 minutes on the next class. Then he gave them an assignment and taught the next class again, and so it went on. Teachers were scarce in our former German parts. They came all the way from Brno and Hranice to teach us. We didn't understand them and they didn't understand us. We sat on the chair and it creaked. The teacher shouted: 'Damn it, don't creak the chair!' We didn't know it was called a 'chair' in Czech. We just called it a 'table' in our dialect."
"Those Russian soldiers were poor people. They had no culture. They didn't even know how to sit on the toilet, doing it next to it. They were dirty. They couldn't even ride a bicycle. They sat on the bike and bang, they couldn't keep their balance. I remember a Russian soldier took our bicycle. He went out on the main road, but my mother followed him and tried to take the bike. He wouldn't let go. Mom grabbed the pump, the luftpumpe, and hit him on the arms as he was leading the bike. The neighbor saw my mum beating on the soldier from her window and was afraid he'd shoot her because he had a gun. But my mother beat the soldier until he let go of the bike and my mother came home with the bike."
Vilibald Kostelník was born on 7 July 1940 into a blacksmith and farmer family in Hať in the Hlučín region. In the spring of 1945, he witnessed combat action of the Opava-Ostrava Operation and the end of the war. As a boy he spoke German and the “po naszymu” local dialect, learning Czech at school. Later in life, he spent two years at the Winter Farming School in Hlučín. In the 1950s, the Kostelniks refused to join a cooperative and farmed privately throughout the socialist era. In addition to working on the farm, Vilibald Kostelník also worked as a foundryman at the Bohumín Iron and Wire Works in the 1960s. He met Polish peasants who came to work there in the winter. In 1972, he left the industry and took over the land, livestock and machinery from his parents. He bought a combine harvester and upgraded the farm. After the fall of the communist regime, he expanded the family farm and passed it on to his sons later on. He died in February 2024, six months after the filming for Memory of Nation.
