Jan Ston

"After school, I stayed home to work with my parents on the farm. We had six or seven hectares from the county, then some more were added to the ten. We didn't know then what a disaster would come to the whole village, to the whole nation as part of the collectivization of the village. Daddy bravely resisted it, for which we all suffered, because every year they changed our fields and gave us further and further away from the village, until we finally ended up at the forest, where the grain and all the crops were already being destroyed by the forest animals, which the forest was full of at that time. And it ended up that there was no money for the grain supply that the national committee had prescribed and kept increasing, so they couldn't tighten it anyhow and they joined the cooperative. There they were all forgiven. That was not the case with our father. He bravely resisted, whereupon he suffered from the fact that the fields kept being replaced like that until he ended up under that forest where it was almost impossible to harvest anymore. But the supply was so large that there was nothing left to fill. So one day, when my father went to the fields, some representatives of the national committee came with some other employees and simply stole the grain from the land. The rest that was there was taken away to fulfill the delivery. In the end, it ended up that we didn't even have any grain left for the next year's sowing, which had to be collected from friends in order to ensure any harvest at all. This is how the mocipans of the time treated people. My father never joined the cooperative. In the end, there were only three private people left in the whole village, until one by one they went to the place of no return. In the end, the cooperative took it all anyway."