František Noháček

“There was a different formula for the amount of the harvest that had to be delivered to the state by small and by huge producers. As a result, the huge farmers were virtually unable to deliver and were constantly at a default. For defaulting, they were penalized by an increase of their quota, which in effect meant that they could never meet their quotas. Usually, the penalties were forgiven upon the joining of a collective farm. But I know people who got a notice after five years saying that they were obliged to pay the penalty to the state. They had to either pay it or they were deprived of all of their property. If they didn’t pay, they lost any claim to their property. So in fact they had no choice, because in the course of those five years, the penalty had grown immensely because the interest rate was rather high and in fact it couldn’t be paid up. And the Communists provided it with the semblance of an official decree.”

“From my acquaintances I know about one incident, when a woman illegally slaughtered a hog and her neighbor reported it to the authorities. That woman ended up in a concentration camp for it, because slaughtering a pig during the war was a major offense. That was no triviality. That neighbor was probably envious of her and thus she informed the Gestapo and…”

“For instance my brother-in-law – he was an enormously social man. I didn’t go to the pub. I was seeing my friends but not in the pub. He went to the pub, he was a member of the football club, he let the football players play on one of his fields and helped them in every possible way. In spite of that, they signed a waiver for him to leave the village. When they wanted somebody to move out of the village, three communists had to sign on to it, that they so wished. And they did sign it for him. It was in Senice.”

“They would organize these meetings where they tried to talk the farmers into joining the farms collectives. But they wouldn’t change their minds. These campaigns came in waves and they were centrally organized in order to break the resistance. They tried to convince the people that joining the collectives was immensely advantageous. One of those waves came in 1952. They jailed a big farmer in almost every village and they used it as a deterring example for the other farmers. Nobody knew about the fate of the arrested farmers for at least a month. They used this time in order to visit the remaining farmers and pressure them to join. They would say: ‘look, it’s dangerous. We’re not to be blamed for it. They arrested one peasant because he failed to deliver in-kind to the state. This could happen to you, too. If you join the collective farms, you’ll have peace of mind’.”