“I was drafted into the Third Aviation Battalion in Valašské Meziříčí. The very next day we went to Plavecké Podhradie, north of Bratislava, which was our boot camp. I spent two months there. Everything went on normally, the Communists didn’t filter us. The political officer always called me in to have a chat. He never said anything to the effect that he was finding something out about me. I didn’t notice it. He behaved in a friendly manner, we were on first-name terms. One time he came up and told me he hadn’t thought I was such a bitch. I asked him why, and he said he’d let me read the assessment sent by the Communists from my village. It stood there that I was raised in a clerical way, that I was a kulak and an undesirable. As soon as he gave it to me to read, the very next day he sent me with my gun and my things to Valašské Meziříčí, where I cleaned windows in the kitchen for three days. Then he sent me to the mine, and I was on my own again.”
“The second day one boy from our room went to the village. He’d had a baby born, so he was going to buy him his first slippers. By some accident he got caught up in the extraction machine, and it mashed him to bits. One dead in our room on just the second day.”
“The Germans blew up the railway bridge over the Morava the day before our liberation. When the front passed by, the Russian soldiers started building a new bridge. I was seventeen years old, and I drove horses. We hauled rocks out of the Morava, poured concrete, and all able men had to go work there. I remember that one Russian soldier fell down there and died. Then there was a bloated German soldier who came floating down the Morava face down. We dragged him out and buried him.”
“We had a super-Communist living in the life tenancy [a specific Czech legal and cultural institution, in which a small independent flat is kept in an outlying part of the farmhouse for the elderly parents to retire to when they pass the farm on to their children or another farmer - trans.], he was a butcher. We shared a door. I tried to work out how I’d secretly kill the pig. I made a kind of pair of electric pliers from the slats of a bundling machine, and in the night we sealed up the door to the pigsty, and I killed it with the pliers. Dad was afraid and didn’t come out at all, so I killed it and gutted it myself. The Communist Pur, whose dead now, lived with his wife in the life tenancy. When I came back from military service, and because I’d worked in construction, I wanted to fix up a place for myself. We didn’t have anywhere to live, and the life tenancy was mine. So I applied at the village [committee], saying that I’d married and that I want to repair it and live there. The chairman Antonín Machálek told me that Communists took precedence. So I wasn’t allowed to live in my own place. Then I went to the butcher, and he told me to wall up one of the doors, that I could live in one of the rooms. There were three rooms in all.”
Jaroslav Kunstfeld was born on 1 April 1928 in Moravičany, where the family owned a farm with thirteen hectares of fields. During the collectivisation period the local Communist functionaries pushed his parents to join the village’s united agricultural cooperative (UAC). His parents resisted the pressure, and when Jaroslav Kunstfeld started his compulsory military service in October 1950, the village committee sent a personal assessment that caused him to be assigned to the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (AEC). The Communist regime would send “politically unreliable” people to serve in the corps as a cheap labour force. The witness spent the next three years extracting black coal from Gottwald Mine in Horní Suchá. After his release he tended to a private farm for two years. In 1956 another UAC was founded in Moravičany, and the family had no choice but to join it. Jaroslav Kunstfeld was employed as a bricklayer at the co-op, later as a farm equipment mechanic. In the first free elections after the fall of Communism, the witness received the most votes in the village and served as mayor for four years. As of 2017, he lives with his wife Jiřina in his native house in Moravičany.
The railway bridge in Moravičany, which on May 7, 1945 destroyed German soldiers. The photos were taken by Bohumír Benda, who killed the grenade the following day
The railway bridge in Moravičany, which on May 7, 1945 destroyed German soldiers. The photos were taken by Bohumír Benda, who killed the grenade the following day
