Alois Melich

"They gave me a condition that they would fire me and take me back when my parents join the cooperative. We were talking about it at home, we had two small children. It was a difficult situation. So my parents, under the pressure, signed it, joining the cooperative. I returned to the factory and the director told me in such a contrite way that they could only take me on condition that I work in the factory for half a year and in a cooperative for six months in the winter. I said no. I would do the most menial work in the cooperative and the same in the factory. We had a big fight. I went to make a complaint in the presidential office too. It came to the court in Železný Brod from the presidential office. There was a party secretary, Comrade Kobr, there was a factory director, and it was happening without me. I later learned from the director that the judge had said that it was difficult with me, that they had no paragraph for me, that they don´t know what to do. The secretary of the Kobr party had the manners of an SS man, he allegedly shouting at the judge to stick his paragraphs up somewhere. Eventually, after a long struggle, a friend from the corporate headquarters came to tell me that they would have to take me back and pay my salary back. And I really won that time."

"One nice day a tractor, security, militia arrived and they brought a piece of paper that in Zásada u Semil above Železný Brod, that a cooperative was being established there. And that they need a straw blower there, that it is unused at our place. They loaded it and they gave a piece of paper to my father and that was it. So, of course, my father was very furious about it, it made him very angry. My father had fierce temper, he told them something, what they didn't like, of course."

"The Russians arrived. They came above our cottage and camped there, they came with horses and I remember that they had a lot of alcohol and wine in the wagon. They took it somewhere and when they were leaving, the horses from the hill, they didn't have brakes on those wagons, so they stuck a stick in that wheel, they just blocked one wheel - and that stick broke and the loaded wagon started going down the hill. The horses tore away from it, and I know there were a lot of broken bottles of wine. Those are my experiences, well. They were pretty drunk."

“I have one strange experience which happened when I was enrolled in the first grade of elementary school. My father led me to the school to register me. In the elementary school in Podmokly there was the principal Mr. Růžička, a very kind man. What happened was this: the principal asked me: ‘Do you already know some counting? Can you count? Could you count the chairs around the table for us?’ And so I tried. One, two, three, four, five, six. I was very happy with myself that I have counted them. And the principal then pulled out a chair from under the table, and the chair did not have a backrest and so I did not notice it and he said: ‘See, there is one more.’ And I was very negatively impacted by that. You know, I lost my confidence and my looking forward to going to school was over. That’s my nature, you know.”

“The local communist party chairman here was certain Kobr. His manners were awful, and I can say that he behaved as an SS man; he was yelling at people and he was rude. I thought that no matter how it would turn out, I would go and talk to him and discuss how we would deal with all this. What happened meanwhile was this: in the Rudé Právo newspaper, there was a column for work-related issues. Any my wife wrote to the newspaper and explained our situation and she wrote that I had been fired from my job without a reason and that the only reason was the pressure to join the agricultural cooperative. By coincidence it happened that I went to see this Communist Party chairman in his office, which was on the other side of the street, if you know where doctor Navrátil is, the Communist Party secretariat was in the villa on the opposite side of the street. And by chance two journalists from the Rudé Právo newspapers arrived there, and they had been at the factory before and they enquired about me and about what kind of man I was. They did not learn anything bad about me and so they came to the Communist Party office just at the moment when I happened to be waiting there to be received by the comrade chairman. I did not know who they were and they did not know who I was. The door opened and as soon as he heard my name, the chairman comrade started yelling as crazy, he was swearing and shouting. And there was no discussion, they introduced themselves and they went into his office and I left, and there was no discussion anymore.”

“I married, we had two children and then came the pressure to join the cooperative. My father did not want to join and he resisted. It went so far that one day at four o’clock in the morning the militia and the police arrived here and they searched the whole house and they turned everything upside down. They took money which my parents had there; they had just sold two pigs and all this money was taken from them. They were looking for some pretext, for some letter, my dad were supposed to receive some letter. But they never found any letter and they sentenced him nevertheless, they took him away. He was in Valdice for two years and then he returned in very poor health.”