“I guess it was good that way, as the farmers would feed the cattle at the co-op on Sunday morning, wash and attend a service in church from 10:30 to noon. It was quite remarkable for village people to not work on Sundays. And it actually took a long time for the local natives, who were not religious, to quit working on Sundays. Later on – years later – they would also quit working on Sundays.”
“We used to go there; our families met often. We usually came for village feasts, pig-killings and such. As children, we listened to adults, but we never remembered what they were saying because it didn’t matter to us. They never spoke about the Bolsheviks in our presence, I think, because they knew they could end up in prison for saying something ‘wrong’. If they say something in the children’s presence, the children will say it somewhere else, and that can cause a problem. My mother told me she once said in public that Stalin was worth shit – pardon my language – when someone was defending him. The StB came to her very soon. Luckily, there was a kind person in charge at the National Committee and he defended her, so it calmed down. But we knew that any slandering was dangerous. So, I think my parents never spoke about those things to protect us and themselves, of course.”
“He said that when he was a [tank] driver, three tanks were lost after he’d been reassigned to another post. Whenever he left a position, his replacement in it would die. It was incredible. Later on, he operated the turret, and the tank got hit in the turret just after he’d been reassigned to a different post. It felt like he was always one step ahead of death. Thinking about it, it still gives me shivers. He told me how they once drove the tank to hide behind a castle ruin to avoid the enemy line of sight. Since there was nobody to provide them with supplies, they walked the fields at night and searched for potatoes, half frozen by then. They searched for potatoes and tapped one against another to find if they were indeed potatoes and not pebbles, and that’s all they got for food.”
Jaroslav Opočenský was born in Litoměřice on 17 December 1949. His father Vladislav and uncle Bedřich were Volhynian Czechs from the village of Český Boratín. During World War II, they served with the 1st Czechoslovak Army Corps under Ludvík Svoboda’s command and they relocated to Czechoslovakia after the war. His father settled in Chotiněves near Litoměřice. The witness lived a happy childhood there, even though in hindsight he understands that his parents’ lives at the time were affected by fear from the growing power of the communists. As a boy, he heard many stories from his father and uncle about the tough times they endured during wartime. The witness obtained gardener training at a vocational school and worked at a farming cooperative as a cattle feeder. The fact that farmers were compelled to join cooperatives – often forcibly – was something he did not initially perceive negatively; he believed that joining the co-ops made farmers’ work easier. He then made his living as a gardener and fruit grower. It was only after the revolution of November 1989 that the took more interest in history and realised how much communists had affected the lives of his parents and uncle. He became the chairman of the Local National Committee in Liběšice immediately after the Velvet Revolution. After that, he went on to work as a gardener in the UK for 14 years.
