Jenovefa Poňuchálková

“Well, it was rough when it came. No one wanted to give his own up, right, and the Communists made the rounds and kept at the farmers. My chap always went together with my dad. They’d be invited over to the village hall for some talking, and he always came back dejected and crying, and the Communists kept telling him he had to sign and that if he didn’t sign, they’d send us off packing and give the house here to someone else, and we’d be out. When there was no other way, they kept pushing and forcing, so in the end he signed it, in fifty-three - we joined the co-op then. Well, so he signed it, but he didn’t want to enter the co-op, because he worked at the power plant in Hodonín. Well, and then he had to leave the power plant as well... not that they would have fired him, but the co-op wrote to them and he had to go into the co-op. Well, when he came there and read: ‘He signed it, he signed it, I don’t know how long we can resist, how long we’ll last.’ I said: ‘If you have to sign it and there’s no other way, if they keep pushing at everyone and won’t leave them alone...’ So then he signed it. We had pigs, some young ones, we kept one cow, and the other and a heifer, some calves - they took those too. You can well imagine it was hard to bear, hard to give up all of that. Hard, but when you see it going, well there’s nothing to be done, you have to bear it whether you like it or not.”

“Everything was forbidden. There were no dances, we only really gathered around the village, in various places. If someone could play the accordion, he’d play the accordion and we’d prance around, and that was our dance - it was all so suppressed, nothing was allowed. Even at the farm. I know my parents would say the financials [officers] were coming, we had to hide everything. To even have enough to eat, we had to make hide-outs. You couldn’t leave it around because it was measured, and there were limits to what you could or could not have, and if they thought you had something extra, they took it, no questions. We had it in the house, we had a room there with a hole dug under it and bricked up. It was there, with furniture placed on top... They came to us as well. When there was to be a slaughter, the financial officer came to check how many pigs there were and what condition they were in and whether this and that was or wasn’t there. We had to hand in our grain, but we scraped by somehow. It always worked out that we didn’t go hungry and that we always had something to eat.”