Josef Slimáček

"The headmaster of the school was a real hard-core communist named Josef Kyselík, whose wife was Russian. He humiliated us severely. After all, when my father and the farm was liquidated, the Valašské Meziříčí Purchase Plant assigned cattle to care of, but of course my mother could not do it on top of her daily duties, so we boys before we went to school took care of it there before school. And the same after school. Sadly we attended school dirty, as there was no bathrooms back then, it was only built later and one could clean up after work. How many times I came to school late, because before we cleaned up in the stable, thirty-five, forty bulls, it wasn't a joke... Then the headmaster was calling me bad names, sending me to to the pastures with the cows. And it was not quite simple..."

"[Vojtěch] Sure, of course, they are artists and they do their things their own way. A lot of people there mocked a little or even added things that were not true and many people were angry with my father. Interviewer: "So a certain degree of reality has been preserved there?" The heart of the matter is real, the characters are real, even though a farmer named Kurfürst was actually called Brix, but that's the details."

Question from the interviewer: "And he eventually got into the JZD?" J.S.: "He could not do otherwise. No one wanted him. The fattening of the cattle was over. We could not take back the land and whatever they would be willing to give us was only at the edge of the cadastre, maybe four or five kilometers away. And he still suffered from angina pectoris as the result of that extraordinary exercise and pneumonia. So he wasn't healthy. So he bent down in the end, but he was only doing it for three or four years. Because everyone forcing him to work started spitting on him. As my father wanted to work honestly so that it made sense. So thaat the cooperative was set up and it would prospered, it would require honest work. And many people just did not like it.”

"The escape was very dramatic because he was sick. He had pneumonia. He bought a ticket in Prerov, but he lacked the money. The cashier lent him or gave him the money. But he took the wrong train in those with fevers. He didn't go back to Přerov, he went to the cashier who helped him until he got to Kunovice. It was in winter. The winters were very hard at that time. He walked from Kunovice on foot. The roads were always blown, so the road was hard, and he came to Kelch's garden because our garden ended in the direction of Kunovice railway station. He remained laying down and the dog sensed him. He got out in the garden and more or less by its presence and activity, he forced him to get - he came home."