Monika Ruská

"Before the JZD (unified agricultural cooperative) started, people had recovered from the war a bit. We had fields of the first soil quality class near Dolní Benešov. We also had about eight head of cattle, maybe six pigs, sows, piglets, three horses, and countless poultry, approximately one hundred. Those fields of ours were near the village. Then the JZD started and they changed our fields. They took our good quality and well-farmed ones and exchanged them for the fields of the farmers who had entered the JZD first. At that time the farmers were more or less bankrupt. Some of them, not all of them, tended to drink. Their fields were not well kept. They changed our fields twice in that time, and they wanted higher and higher yields, which was impossible."

"When they took everything from us, they called it free rent, they left us nothing to live from. My father was obliged to support my grandfather, his father, who was a life tenant. We had nothing and he still had to support him. When my father asked if my grandfather could get the old age pension to which he was entitled, they answered that they would only grant him the pension if he joined the agricultural cooperative, otherwise they would not. Yet somehow we managed to survive."

"All our fathers were in the Wehrmacht, so we didn't really care about it. But I remember that when we played soldiers in a sandpit, nobody wanted to be Russian. We all wanted to be American or German. We played soldiers with wooden rifles. People say my parents were fascists, but we don't consider them fascists. They were our parents and it never crossed our minds. And there's also something else. We had rather negative memories of the Russians. When the front came during the war, they were staying here too. They had an operating room where Russian doctors operated. Some memories of them were good, some were not. My grandfather always told us a story of when a Russian took off his leather boots and my grandpa tried to fight back, and the Russian told him, 'You still have a head. Be happy.' They also took his horse."