“He was on the western front. He spent the whole war in the West as an airman, and when he came back, they had a farm, too. I think it was in 1948 or 1949, I cannot tell you exactly, and he was accused of having some anti-state group and they imprisoned him, and they evicted the woman as well. They let my parents and certain Neubauer family live there for about two more years. But afterwards, since they did not have enough land to establish a cooperative, they evicted these to families as well. The other people were then afraid, and the small farmers thus joined the cooperative and they actually established the Unified Agricultural Cooperative there.”
“They took his field, which he had on a flat terrain, and instead they gave him only fields on the edges which did not yield anything, and they set the delivery quotas so high for him that he was unable to meet them. And since he did not meet them, they had another reason to bully him in order to punish him somehow. And then, since he said that he would not meet the delivery quotas, they imprisoned him, too. They sent him to prison for about half a year. Then they said that he had failed to meet the delivery quotas, and therefore they evicted him.”
“It did not happen in every village. In villages where all of them were larger farmers, they kept together and they could not be evicted so easily, but here in Puklice, there was a lot of... I don’t know how to explain it to you. During the war, there was certain Mr. Mareš, he was a Czech, and he was making leather coats for Germans. Then, after the war, people marked him as a collaborationist, and they imprisoned him, too. And the people who got to him were mostly people from other places and they did not have any relation to the village, and these people then made troubles like this.”
Libuše Votavová, née Šuhajová, was born June 25, 1932 in Puklice near Jihlava. After completing a local two-class elementary school she began attending the higher elementary school in Brtnice, but the school became closed down in 1942. After the war she studied a school of nursing. Her family was evicted from their farm in the 1950s during the collectivization process. Libuše’s father was imprisoned for half a year for not being able to meet the required delivery quotas. Libuše Votavová has been working in the hospital in Jihlava for her entire life. The family received the farm back in the restitution process after 1989, but it was left in a devastated state. She passed away in 2021.
