“It was during the war. There were air raids just around the time he was born. I always had to grab him and rush off to hide. We had air raids here when Pepek was born, that was in forty-two... There was a dyke a bit further off, and they made a hole into it where we could hide during air raids... I always took Pepek, wrapped him up in a blanket, and hurried off on foot all the way over there... and then I’d sit down. There were some women there, two or three of us, and waited to see what would happen. Because we could hear the air raids as they flew overhead. When the weather was good, we could even see them, splendidly, high up in the sky, then they went to Kolín and dropped it there, and it hit a tree and a house all the way up by the graveyard and killed the people there. They were in the cellar, and the house crumbled and crushed them.”
“My parents were supposed to join the co-op, but they didn’t sign. My husband joined, he worked as a tractor driver. And there were horses here, and one man used to come here from up the top, he always went to the village, and he’d come here for the horses and take them for a ride. My parents didn’t sign it, so they gave them the [paragraph] fifty-fiver, so they wouldn’t get any money. Then they took the horses, they took the cows too, and we didn’t get anything. Then there were heifers here, and Mum had to feed them to get some kind of pension at all... The family needed some extra income, so she fed them here to get a pension.”
“When my parents refused to sign and when they confiscated the place, we could do nothing at all... We were lucky they didn’t evict us... because they did that to two or three farms here. They forced them out and then took it, the farm, what had belonged to them, they took.”
Lidmila Nedbalová was born on 3 May 1925 into the farming family of Tluchoř in Jestřábí Lhota near Kolín. She attended primary school in Jestřábí Lhota, Kolín, and Ovčáry, where she learnt to cook. Already as a child, she helped her parents on the farm. She married Josef Nedbal when she was seventeen so they might both avoid being sent to forced labour in the Reich during World War II. Soon after, in 1942, she gave birth to their son Josef; the young mother often had to hide with her baby in shelters to avoid air raids. When the Communists came to power in 1948, farms were collectivised en masse, and the witness’s parents were pressured to join the local united agricultural cooperative (UAC). When they refused, the family farm and all their cattle was confiscated. Lidmila Nedbalová and her husband later joined the UAC and worked there for about thirty years. Besides their son Josef they also raised a daughter, Helena. Lidmila Nedbalová still lives in the village of her birth.
