Ing. Josef Kutil

* 1940

  • "When we lived there in Lahovice, there lived a Mrs. Poustevská and she also went there to the field and to collect sugar cane, and they got even cheaper sugar for doing some work there. She then moved here and lived here in Stráčky. And so she went to collect beetroot and they said she went for a pay check and they gave it to her, so she cried out how little money the people had here. That mostly the chiefs had it. They secured the grain for themselves. But mainly because they were not experts."

  • "There were small pigs for sale. It could only be killed illegally, so I remember we organised the killing once, and that was to keep it from being heard. So there was a funeral, and when the music went and they banged on the drum, right then the pig was killed."

  • "The joint management probably consisted in the fact that it was mainly a joint threshing and such. And they wanted us to buy straw, for example, from the fields that were ours and that the parents took care of, so they wrote us some kind of invoices, I would say. Or when, for example, we went to give out ratios, because it was written... So, we were not members of the team, so we were given regulations on what had to be submitted. It was given to Písnice to the cooperative. Well, we put the pigs or anything else there and they didn't give us any money automatically. They just said it was in favour of the cooperative and it stopped it."

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    Praha, 15.09.2020

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    duration: 38:44
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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You will arrange farming and then throw you out of your own house

Josef Kutil in 2020
Josef Kutil in 2020
photo: PNS

Josef Kutil was born on June 6, 1940 in Prague. His family owned a small farm in Točná near Prague. However, this was confiscated after 1948 and in 1952 they had to move out of their house because they refused to join the collective farm. Since then until the end of the communist regime, they lived with relatives in Lahovice. Josef graduated from university and worked as a surveyor on highway construction. After 1989, the house was returned to the family in restitutions, and since then Josef has lived in Točná again.