"Well, the comrades persuaded as much as they could. They threatened a lot when the owner didn't want to agree. Then there was nothing else. They were so hard... if some of them couldn't be broken right away, then they tried to keep on with the farming, well, they gave him second rate land, which were the worst, to break him, and finally he had to sign the cooperative farm."
"They took one cow from us. They took it to the village, then one SS man went to... drove the sow out, saying they were going to kill her, and as they drove her into the yard, my mum went and was driving the sow into our garden. He walked up to her, grabbed her by the shoulder, slammed her on the ground where there was manure. So she started screaming and he took the sow and drove her around the village to where they had their had cars. And there they made a slaughter."
"What I have experienced is very sad. I have memories of when at least a hundred or so, maybe more, SS men arrived in the spring of '45. They came to the village because there was partisan activity there. They were looking for the partisans and asking the local people what they knew and didn't know about them, and they came with the conclusion to shoot seven men on the spot. There was also a teacher in the village, I can't remember his name, and he knew German. So somehow he made a deal with them. Also in the village there was and still is a distillery where they used to burn plum brandy. So he was with those Germans and he and the distiller agreed to give one barrel, fifty litres of plum brandy, to those soldiers. So they used quite a lot of it and they made concessions: instead of seven men, seven farm buildings. Among them was the barn where we lived."
Antonín Novosád was born on 27 October 1931 into a family of farmers farming in Loučka near Újezd in Wallachia. His childhood was all work, responsibility and toil, as it was generally the case in the barren Wallachia. As a child, he used to herd cows when he returned from school and help in the fields. In April 1945, fourteen days after the massacre at nearby Ploština, Prlová and Vařák’s Pastures, an SS commando raided Loučka with the intention of shooting seven men for allegedly helping the partisans. The locals managed to prevent the tragedy and the drunken soldiers contented themselves with setting fire to seven barns. After the change of the political regime in the 1950s, Antonín’s parents were forced to join a cooperative farm (JZD), and almost all the farmers in the village gradually succumbed to pressure and threats. After graduating from the municipal school, his father did not want his son to study, he wanted him to help him farm. Antonín, however, had his own way, he felt the need to educate himself, he graduated first from the Secondary and then from the Agricultural College in Brno and became a zootechnician. He worked in three cooperative farms in the vicinity of Loučka, where he still lives today. His hobby from his youth was and still is music: he learned to play several musical instruments and founded the dance band Lučanka and the brass band Lhot’anka. He is also an enthusiastic beekeeper and would like to pass on the art of beekeeping to his grandson.
