"There were about three kulaks in the village. Us, my aunt and one other family. It turned out that some people were not as nice as they used to be. Some became communists. Well, we were the kulaks, so the trouble started. They started talking about evicting us. In the next village, for example, they evicted the kulaks by giving them a truck, a tractor, and so they loaded up the truck with blankets, just what they needed, very little. And they were taken somewhere near Pilsen and given one room and they lived there. We have a house in the middle of the village, so they said at that time that they would set up the cooperative farm and that they would have offices there and that they would have tractors there and so on. And so they wanted to evict us. Well, there was a communist, his name was Václav Zíka... he was a communist, but he was a good man... so he stopped our eviction, so we were allowed to stay there. We were already impoverished. Lots of fields, no helpers... and they were setting up the cooperative farm. What could we do... We had to join the cooperative farm because we were already totally impoverished. We had no money, we had no ration cards. Just the work, we weren´t able to manage everything. And all the obligatory contributons."
"In the country, 1948 wasn't even very recognizable. We still kept the coachman. But as it was getting closer to the year 1950, we didn't have any more helpers, we had to let them go gradually. My parents had to manage everything themselves. Then we still had to give away eggs, milk, grain. There were big contributions. We didn't even have enough feed for the cattle. One day three guys came to our place looking for sacks of grain in the hay. They thought Daddy wasn't handing all in and that he was hiding it in the hay. That's what I remember when I was a kid, those guys crawling there, but they didn't find anything. But it was horrible to me that some guys were searching our attic. Then they started to call us kulaks. When I say it to young people today, they don't even know what it means. That those were farmers in villages, that they were then labelled like that."
"I used to go to school in the next village through the forest. We had a headmistress Mrs. Konvičková and my dad was a progressive farmer. For example, he bought an electric chicken brooder, it was a kind of lamp shade, and it was heating up and the chickens were raised underneath it. And so we kids would go with the headmistress to watch the chickens on a field trip. So Dad was very progressive in that and in farming, too."
Zdeňka Svobodová, née Pavlíčková, was born on 6 February 1943 into a farmer’s family in Pivkovice in southern Bohemia. After 1948, pressure from the communist regime began to weigh on the family. Gradually, the Pavlíček family had to dismiss all their helpers and hand in more and more contributions to the state. Her parents were increasingly impoverished and under the existential pressure they eventually joined a cooperative farm (JZD). Zdeňka had excellent academic results, but as a daughter of a kulak she was not allowed to study further. According to local officials, she should have joined the cooperative farm after primary school, but fortunately she got the opportunity to attend the secondary fishing school in Vodňany and then the veterinary faculty in Brno. However, she still faced obstacles related to the improper cadre profile of her family. Her two sisters also experienced a similar situation. Today, Zdeňka Svobodová is a recognized scientist in the field of aquatic toxicology.
