Jiří Krista

"As my mother worked in Veba, I went to the pioneer camp. There were various competitions, as is usual at camps. Suddenly, there was a noise on the third night. So, they woke us up, something was going on. The leader was painted, so I know she had black tears running down her face. We went to a hill where there was a freshly cut forest. We made a big fire, a big bonfire, and we burned green branches and made smoke so that the planes that were flying above us couldn't see where they were going."

"Hello, Jiří Krista is my name. I was born in Bezděkov on December 20, 1957. My father came from Česká Čermná, which is here behind the hills, behind the pine, in the Czech corner. Grandmother lived here on a farm building. In the war, his father had to leave his native village, Mala Čermná, and after the war he fled with his family to Bohemia. They had nothing at all and had to start from scratch."

"Well, the hunters took care of the wild animals here. Everything was natural. A lot of draws everywhere. Today there are big fields. There used to be much game here; walking in nature, one would easily met a deer, a hare - today there are large areas. Collective farms plowed it up, there are big fields and you can see the game only from a distance and in large groups. There used to be a smaller herd, one found it slowly at every step where the hares chased each other. There was a herd of about twenty-five partridges, they flew here, it was a pleasure to watch them, to feed them in winter. Today's collective farms plowed the fields and that's not the same anymore. Either the field is yellow, where there is only rapeseed, or there is only corn. Or heavy rain will come and all the soil will be washed away into the valley, and there is no use for it. And more domestic crops were grown, each privateer had his own field to make a living. They had potatoes, beets, various field crops, others - everyone grew beans, peas. There is no more of that in the village today. And how was it with that neighborhood help, even in agriculture? It was such a barter trade. You have a lot of potatoes, so you give me two meters of potatoes, and I have a bigger field again and much wheat, so again I will give you two bags of wheat. There were orchards where the landlord liked to grow apples, so he supplied the whole village with apples. They went to the cherries to help the neighbors pick, someone had a strawberry plantation, so they went to help pick strawberries. People were closer to each other when Grandma baked a bun and said, 'I have little flour, I need more,' so she went to a neighbor: 'Look, don't you have any yeast?' So one neighbor gave yeast, the other had better flour, so she lent flour again. Someone´s hens laid little eggs, so we asked another neighbor for eggs, and if I can't help you with the products, I'll help you chop wood or whitewash the house, for example, it was up to the craftsman how good one was at his craft."

"The biggest event was that we made a revolution in Bezděkov in 1989. In Prague, the regime began to crumble. So we said: 'Why wouldn't we do such a revolution in Bezděkov?' Because the local elected representatives wanted to sell us to the Police, as a local town hall. And we said that we are not a small village, we could have our self-government here in Bezděkov. Why listen to someone who should tell us what to do? So we started going to the local office where they had their meetings, and we did such a supervisory board. We got together and put our heads together and put together a team of 12-15 people, who were not indifferent to Bezděkov's socialist establishment, if you can say that, and such a directive ordering what can and cannot be done. Because they closed our school, the office was in Police... They had to commute everywhere. So we said, 'There are rooms here, so why not have your own, so that it's our´s from Bezděkov?' To have our people in it, because we knew each other here. Slowly, every citizen knew his neighbor, but not only across the street, but also in another part of the village."