Pater Milan Vavro

"Normalization is such a grey time for me. Since that time, since that first class, everything in that society has kind of gone shabby. It was the same shabby streets, the same shabby facades, the same trickety railings, the same rickety trolleybuses, the same smashed roads. When we went to secondary school in Brno, the same ugly shop fronts, the ugly Křenová, it got uglier and uglier and the atmosphere was like that. On the visible side, nothing was being fixed, there was no money for anything, but on the political side it was the same over and over again. The people kept winning, but it was worthless. And then, of course, in the normalization, these things were constantly leaking into the school curriculum here. There was mathematics, the task of the lesson and the educational goal. The task of the lesson was to teach the pupils how to count, and the educational goal was inseparable friendship with the Soviet Union. Yeah, that sort of thing. So we were always getting it drilled into us like that. And at that time, of course, we had an atheist club. It was led by a weird teacher called Vanura. He taight chemistry, and then our class teacher from the sixth grade on was a communist, a devout communist, who was more of a stricter sort of person. I know that in the sixth grade we had to stand up at the desk, those of us who went to religion, there were five of us. And she was talking about how the Communists actually sent rockets into space and Comrade Gagarin found out that there was no God. And then we had to sit down. So in this way it was presented to us that faith is complete nonsense."

"My grandfather's name was Jan Nevídal. He was born in 1903. He moved to Starovice with the idea of farming. He had to learn it all, because he had trained as a shoemaker, then he did bricklaying, and if he wanted to farm, he just had to learn all these things. So they had cows, horses, then small livestock, and seven acres of fields, a vineyard, and even a cellar. So he learned to make wine as well, and it was practically only when he was forty-four that he started farming. And my mother said that their life there improved in the sense that they had enough food because of the farm. And then, when the fifties came, they [the communists] started to insist that of course he should join a cooperative farm, and our grandfather was among the last to go. I guess in 1957. And it was also because they [the communists] were increasing the contributions that they had to deliver so much that it was unbearable. And even my mother said that there were leaflets posted on lampposts saying that Nevídal wasn't delivering his contributions. He was there, or maybe some others, and when they put it up like that, I guess that was the last thing that made Grandpa join the cooperative farm. With that said, after that, the worst jobs were left for Grandpa and Grandma, and their pay was absolutely miserable, so it was kind of tough after that."