Dagmar Vidímová

“I couldn’t stay there (at work) because the communists wrote this article saying that a daughter of a rich farmer has to go home to the farm and not slack around in an office. So I had to go back home to work at the farm. And the 50s came. My father had all the machines so we were threshing. Somebody reported him that he’s undermining the process, that he wants some of the grain for himself. So in April 1953 they arrested him, he was in Kralupy, and my mother and grandmother received a notice that within a week a car would come and they would be forcibly relocated.”

“After a week, on Saturday, a car pulled over, cops. They only loaded what fit in the car. The villagers were standing by the chapel here, they felt sorry, because if my father had stayed in the local JZD it would at least have a future. But here, the JZD was taken over by these sixty-year-old grannies who did go to work but didn’t understand farming. And so my mother and grandmother got into the car. I wasn’t relocated because I was married and my husband and his father followed the car on a motorcycle because we didn’t know where they were moving them. They moved them near Lanškroun into this village where only kulaks lived.”