“We used to bake bread at home. The flour was grounded in a mill. In May 1948, my father brought ground flour from Petřík's mill from Bystříček, he put it in a loft, and it burned there the next day. So people brought us some flour. We hardly had any meat, mostly on Sundays. Otherwise, we ate what we produced - mostly vegetables. We were used to be poor.”
“One day an officer came from Lanškroun and told me to go to Chrudim for military service recruitment. I had to start as a backup within three days. From the military administration in Chrudim, I was sent to the Technical auxiliary battalions. I trained in Kroměříž and then they sent us to the mines in Ostrava. I spent a year and a half there. I walked in uniform for a year and I could wear civilian clothes for half a year. At the time, soldiers who were from agriculture could serve the remaining time as civilian. So I agreed. I wore civilian clothes, but my duties were still military.”
“My father didn't want to join the Cooperative, so they gave him more land, so we had nineteen hectares. We delivered 10 000 kg of grain, 10 000 kg of potatoes and a lot of meat, hens, pigs, beef and milk. It was hard to fulfil, we usually failed to deliver. But the people from the village helped us, back then the milk could be transferred. But when my father didn't deliver required amount, he was sentenced to a month in the 1950s. And he was sentenced to three months the second time.”
Jaroslav Vaníček was born on 1 March 1938 in Bystřec at the foothills of Orlické hory. His father Josef Vaníček (1897–1974) and his mother Marie, née Vávrová (1902–1970), ran a farm of sixteen hectares, which had been owned by their family from the 17th century. Jaroslav had five siblings: Marie (1921–1992), Josef (1923–2006), František (1932–2010), Ladislav (1934–2016) and Václav, who was born in 1944. In the last days of the war, the family was hiding three fugitive British soldiers in a barn. In the 1950s, the family was affected by the violent collectivization of agriculture. In 1953, the three largest farmers and their entire families were evicted from the village. The Vaníček family was supposed to be fourth. His father Josef was imprisoned twice as he failed to deliver required volume of agriculture production. In late 1950s, his father eventually joined the Unified Agriculture Cooperative (JZD). After elementary school, Jaroslav attended a one-year agricultural vocational school. In 1957, he enlisted in the military service for the Technical Auxiliary Battalions, where he worked in the Ostrava mines as an enemy of the regime. After returning from the military service, he worked at the Unified Agriculture Cooperative in Bystřec as a mechanizer. In 1962, he married Marie, née Kyllarová, and together they raised four children. After the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989, the Vaníček family began to farm privately again after forty years. In 2021, Jaroslav lived with his wife in Bystřec. He died on April 22, 2022.
