Alojz Kuna

“Several years passed and I was cutting trees with my father. You know, we had a large garden, so we wanted to beautify it. My sister grew up; she was nineteen years old and she started to go out with the son of man who once said: ‘This is ours as well.’ Our father usually came home from Bohumín once in two months and it was in summer when he went out to the toilet and saw my sister sitting under the walnut tree with some boy and flirting. Father went closer, looked at him and when he recognised whose son he was, he shouted at him, gripped him by the collar and he kicked him until he was on the street. And some boys told me: ‘Lajo, go home, you father is fighting with somebody.’ When I came home, my sister was crying, mother was folding her arms. ‘Oh God, what has happened here?’ And she told me that story. Then I said: ‘Dad, you surely had fear, didn’t you? If he had turned around, he would have nearly killed you.’ But he was a descent man, so he left. I am sure he came home crying and his father asked him what had happened. And he had to tell the truth to his father that he was ran out of our house. Together with my father we were on leave next day and I suddenly saw father of that boy going to our garden. I quickly put all the sharp tools such as handsaw or axe away. He came and greeted us: ‘Good morning.’ My father, who was up a stepladder, looked at him, climbed down, came to him and said: ‘What do you want here?’ And he responded: ‘Ferko, why did you run my son out of your house? You know that he is a good boy and in spite of it you ran him out so cruelly.’ My father straightened and told him: ‘Not only you deprived me of my land, my property, but you also think that you could claim my daughter. Do you want to take my daughter away from me by violence? Just remember what you had told me back then.’ He turned around dumbly and left. Later he surely told his son: ‘Oh son, don’t go there more. It is my fault that they expelled you.’”

“I am convinced that the worst crime of the communism was that it destroyed respect which people felt before. It substituted love and friendship for expediency, for an effort to exploit others and thus it made people’s characters corrupted. Just imagine the warp and broken tree. What will its fruit look like? Like this! This is the consequence and it will be really hard to return back to former ideas and manners, to that love for land which our parents and ancestors felt. This will be a real artistry.”

“I started to work on the farm when I was only a child. I will never forget what my father used to tell me when I was fifteen-year-old boy, when I used to go there and learn to plough: ‘You know, son, when the sun is as high as the walnut tree in our yard, stop ploughing, unhitch your cattle and go home. But woe betide you, if you go to the pantry right after coming home, if you cut a slice of bread, butter it, and if you go to cowshed and let your cattle look as you are eating. Remember that your cattle are the first. You have to water and feed them and only then you may have dinner, pray and go to bed.’ My father, both my parents encouraged me to live this way. I should work like this on the field, on my piece of land that we had owned for years.”

“‘In 1952 when they deprived your father of his entire property and finally sentenced and imprisoned him, at that time I was the treasurer of the collective farm, I was the head (he speaks in the meantime). I know what had happened there, and I could and want to tell you everything to let you know the whole truth.’ And he told me: ‘You know, when they took everything away from you, they took money from other people as well and we got money from the state but I wasn’t the most important man there who could decide, thus we said: We won’t pay out money to them; almost all of them are dirty kulaks and we won’t help them and give them any money. We will divide it among us, collective farm members. Power is in our hands; don’t presume to give them a crown! Some money was shared but the worst thing was that May 1950 came and the currency reform took place. Money was devalued and thus we couldn’t bring it back, we couldn’t afford it,’ he said. ‘It is the reason but I tell you something. You are right, fight for your rights. They either have to return your property to you, or refund it.’”

“On September 1, 1952, I started to study at the secondary school of mining in Nováky. Two months later a boy from our village came to me, he was an apprentice miner as well. He spent Sunday at home, so he was the first one who told me: ‘Your father was arrested, they jailed him.’ Well, when I came home, I asked my mother how it happened. She only told me: ‘Oh son, as it was autumn we went digging potatoes with your father. The chairman of the Local National Committee, Comrade Miškolci, came and told us that we had to go home right away. And when we did so, children who came from schools and other people were standing on the street and staring at us, it was like a theatrical performance. They forced your father to stand in the corner where two policemen guarded him and in the meantime they took everything.’ Absolutely everything. My mother told me that they had taken even knives prepared for a pig slaughter, flour, bread, walnuts, rabbits; they took everything in sequence and cleaned our house totally. My mother was forty at that time, I was sixteen, my brother two and sister eleven years old and when they were leaving our house, my mother asked them: ‘What should I give to my son when he comes home on Sunday?’ You know, at that time people worked also on Saturdays. And then the chairman looked at my mother and said: ‘Snuff it here of hunger just like the dog.’ That was his answer. And as this was his answer, I had to think what kind of crime had my father committed.”