Josef Londa

"They farmed the land, one could say very skilfully and sensibly. They were quite rich because of that. They knew how to farm. Those Ukrainians, those men, had no education at that time, and they brought their education from Bohemia, so they knew how to work the land, how to fertilise it. My mother told me that the Ukrainians laughed at them, that they exported the soil to the field and ploughed the manure, that they will make the field 'dirty'. When the Ukrainians were farming and they had a lot of manure, they would let it dry and burn it. And our people, as part of their farming, bought the manure from them and they laughed at them, saying that they hadn't seen it before how they were going to make the land dirty."

"When my parents worked in an agricultural cooperative and we lived in Paseka, the chairman of the cooperative was a man named Jaroslav Niče. He was also a Volhynian, he also came back from Volhynia after the war and he got into the National Assembly as a deputy. He was in contact with my parents, they used to visit each other. I was very happy to listen to them talking, when he would say, for example, observations from that National Assembly. How it was run under the Communists and how they ran it. So, I loved to listen to that. And one time I remember saying: 'Okay, but the system has to change,' and he said: 'An individual alone will do nothing. You have to get together and make a deal. Make more of you, otherwise you can't do anything. I know what's going on there, somehow, some way, it's all ordered, we just sit there and raise our hands.' And he said to me once, it may be happening today, that maybe when they had to pass some bills, some proposals that were not unanimous: 'They offered us so much money. If you raise your hand, you won't have to do anything for the rest of your life.'"