Milan Kunčík

"There was a municipal office in our house next door. They arranged one room, and the neighbours rented it." - "In Kostelec?" - "No, in Lutotín, I'm talking about Lutotín, I was only in Kostelec at school. The mayor of the village worked there, in Lutotín. So of course we always invited helpers from the family to help at the pig killing. My aunt and uncle Štěpán would come to help because the butcher needed help sometimes. Wash the intestines, somebody had to cook the soup, somebody had to help with this, somebody had to help with that... So the uncle went there too, that's why I say that, to see why he was there. He always had moments like that, when he saw, he would disappear, he would sit behind the wall in the garden and he would smoke - he had a little pipe and he would go and smoke, so he would sit there. I want to say this ahead, when the Gestapo [arrived], there was a denunciation against the former mayor, because he was already the former mayor. There was already another one appointed there who was a supporter of the Germans or whatever. He was kind of, I don't know whether to say traitor, but, well... Well, the former mayor was reported for having a gun hidden in the barn, like the at the little wall, in the barn. Well, they came to question it, they pulled the mayor and his son down, they took him to the municipal office, and now they questioned the daddy, and they drove the son out into the yard. So he was waiting there, and through the fence he actually had this chat [they were talking] with ŠTěpán, who was smoking. The son called out to him, he said - because he [the uncle] knew it, he was a horse driver, he served in the war with the horses, he did the helper here and there, he knew the homesteads and so on: 'You know it there, there is a gun hidden at the wall, if you could do something for it. They'll go there to check!' So Štěpán packed up his pipe, hurried to the neighbouring farmhouse and said: 'Please, they told me a marten was running in here, come hold the ladder for me, I'll scrape it out and we'll put iron trap there.' He knew which wall they were talking about, he had served there now and then. He went and found the gun there. That's what they say, I know it from hearsay, they weren't allowed to say it to a boy then, I'd brag about it and they'd arrest my parents. So normally they say that as soon as he came down the ladder, he heard the barn door creak, so it was high time."

"The year 1948 came, and the private sector began to be prosecuted. The small farmers were in terrible troubles, they couldn't farm independently in their way, so they had to join a cooperative farm whether they wanted to or not, because what was then demanded of them as private owners was murder. They were prescribed such obligatory deliveries that they couldn't grow it on sixty measures, let alone what they had, so they were not able to. So they had to join that cooperative farm. The farmesrs were robbed of what they had so that they weren't allowed to have maids - girls, they weren't allowed to have paid helpers, it didn't work out because the men had to go into heavy industry. So there was absolutely no helper, and they were not allowed to keep the girls either, they had to go to sew in the OP, to the state enterprise, so how would the farmers work it? That was a problem, that was a big problem. Then the housewives helped them, they worked there in return for kind - for grain or land, for potatoes and so on. And again it helped the men to support the family because it... there was no money, so that's how it was run, it was kind of... Well, and then my dad came, well, I didn't understand much as a boy, but I know that, when he was bringing the cows into that cooperative - it wasn't a cowshed yet, they took some farmer's cowshed and they brought it in there, they made a cowshed in this one of his, so they had to bring the cows in there, they had to put it all on the altar - so he was crying because it had been so hard to buy them. Before they bought them, how long it had taken! I don't know how many years they could use it, and when it started to get better, they had to give the cows away again."