"All the children used to go from the school... The library was on the first floor, it was a prayer room, and there were volumes of books everywhere. Some of them were in leather, on parchment and so on... So we were taking them down the stairs, from the first floor to the ground floor, and everybody had a cart, so it was loaded on top of them, and down the long corridor towards the garden, where there was a truck without a tarpaulin, and there were planks, so that you would go straight from that corridor, skipping the stairs, you went straight on top of the truck, and there it was thrown like that, like it was going to the waste collection. And it was taken to Králíky, to the confiscated monastery there. And if there were books lying in the corridor after the guards had looted it, they kicked at this one, then that one. And there were jars of fruit in the kitchen, and they had a barrel of eggs pickled, as it used to be done in lime and water glass, and as they [the guards] got drunk, they were throwing the eggs on the walls, or the jars of fruit... That's how they were raging there. And, for example, there were two dogs, I don't know if they were German shepherds, in the monastery they had always let them out at night. And there was a sacristy and about three meters wide stretch and then the high wall of the farmhouse, so the dogs were there. And when they took the priests away, the dogs wouldn't let anybody in. So they shot them dead out the window."
"There was a shoemaker in the village called Koudela who was a liaison for the partisans in Brdy and used to bring them food. And my dad would give him sausages and these durable things, and send it to the forests through him. The saddest thing was that after the war, in the year forty-eight, a factory owner from Prague hid the skins for handbags at this shoemaker, so that they wouldn't been taken over, and they put them in a barn where they used to cut wood and throw logs on it. But the next door neighbour - a big comrade woman - reported it. So the People's Militia came, loaded it all on a truck and brought it to the cooperative farm, saying that it would be displayed the next day. But there was nothing left overnight, people stole it all. The same thing [happened] when they took the priests away, everyone stole some carpet, and what they could, people stole. And there was one guy called Svoboda, who, my mother used to say about him that when there was a meeting of the agrarians, that he was beating his chest, that even his blood was green. But with the change of regime he changed his colour and he was a comrade. Well, he stole about six chalices in that monastery, broke them, made some kind of a ball out of it and went to sell it... I don't know which company was buying it at that time. Well, they got suspicious, so they issued a warrant for his arrest. And there was a district policeman in the village, a member of the National Security Corps, his name was Touš, and he said to him: 'Pepík, I'm to arrest you at three o'clock'. And Pepík didn't know any better, so he went to the attic, put a rope up and hung himself. But he had made the rope so long and he was touching the ground with his toes, so it took him much longer to hang himself."
"For example, when they were moving Zeman away, as there is the large farm next to the church in Obořiště, there is a gate, there was Kusovský already waiting behind the gate, who had furniture loaded, and when they took that one [Zeman] away, he [Kusovský] was already there with his own wagon. And he was a bricklayer and he was the chairman of the cooperative farm and he made all the decisions. And in two years they were feeding animals by thatch tiles, if you know what that is. They didn't have anything to feed with, so somewhere somebody was dropping thatch tiles from his house, so they were taking it to the cows. Those were the farmers - today we have everything, tomorrow nothing."
František Stefanides was born on 20 December 1942 in Příbram to Marie and Josef Stefanides, owners of a renowned butcher and sausage shop in Obořiště. After the February 1948 communist coup, his father was accused of running a black market and sentenced to seven months of forced labour. When the established business was nationalized and the family farm was taken under forced lease by an agricultural cooperative farm, the respected citizens of the town became second-class citizens. His mother did menial work in the cooperative farm and his father took a job as a coachman. The label of being sons of a kulak made it impossible for the elder Václav to go to university and took away the opportunity for the younger František to continue the family tradition and train as a butcher. He spent his professional life behind the steering wheel of a bus, working for Czechoslovak State Vehicle Traffic (ČSAD). In 1968 he married Marie Mužíková, with whom he raised four children. The relationship with God has always played a significant role in the witness´s life. He formed a personal bond especially with the pilgrimage site on Svatá Hora near Příbram, where he used to go with his mother during his childhood and which he still likes visiting today. In 1989 he participated in a pilgrimage to Rome for the canonization of Agnes of Bohemia. He welcomed with joy the social changes after 1989, thanks to which the property stolen by the communists was returned to the family administration.
