Jan Ston

* 1942

  • "There were cherries, cherries were being picked. Then the communists came, they pulled out the cherry trees with the roots in full bloom, I remember that. In Bludov they always said there was a double harvest. One when the cherries are picked, and then the other when the crop is in. Everybody had all the borders planted with cherries and it was white when it bloomed. And in that bloom, thousands, millions of bees, riding caterpillars, picking everything out. The whole orchard. The borders ripped up."

  • "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."

  • Full recordings
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    Šumperk, 06.03.2023

    (audio)
    duration: 47:26
    media recorded in project Stories of the region - Central Moravia
Full recordings are available only for logged users.

Then the communists came, pulled out the cherry trees in full bloom with their roots

Jan Ston in 2023
Jan Ston in 2023
photo: Post Bellum

Jan Ston was born on 9 April 1942 in Bludov, Šumperk region, to parents Alois and Zdeňka, née Březin. The blood of important ancestors runs through his veins. His mother’s uncle Jan Březina became an honorary citizen of the village of Bludov for his memoirs. Another uncle of my mother, priest Antonín Březina, was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Kounic dormitories in Brno during the Second World War for his patriotism. His father’s brother Karel Mansuet Ston was interned as a Capuchin by the communist regime in the Želiv monastery and in the monastery of the Mountain of the Mother of God in Králíky. The family owned a farm in Bludov with 10 hectares of fields. During the collectivisation of the countryside, Father Alois Ston resisted not only the constant visits of agitators, the setting up of disproportionate supplies of agricultural commodities which he had to hand over to the state, but also the threat of imprisonment and the exchange of fields. He farmed privately until his death in 1971. Only then did his fields become part of a unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). Jan Ston worked at home on the farm until he entered basic military service in 1961. After two years at the airport in Moshnov, he started working as a driver. In 1966 he married Maria Kvapilova. They built a house in Bludov, where they moved and raised their six children. After working as a driver, he was employed in associate production in the JZD and then in horticulture until his retirement in 2002. At the time of filming in 2023 he was still living in Bludov.