First they deprived us of machines, then of our livelihood, and in the end I wasn’t even supposed to learn
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Bohumil Zalabák was born on August 29, 1942 in Písková Lhota into a family of private farmers. He grew up with his younger sister Maria. The family was religious. The farm of the Zalabák family was one of the larger ones in the village; they had horses and agricultural machinery, which were confiscated by the newly formed unified agricultural cooperative (JZD) after the communist coup in 1948. The Zalabáks joined the JZD under duress in the early 1950s, left after two years, and were then forced to join again in 1958, when high compulsory levies on their agricultural products wiped them out of existence. Bohumil was bullied from the first grade at school because of his “kulak” origin, for the same reason he was expelled from the Sokol in the 1950s, and eventually he was also denied vocational education. In the end, he got into the three-year study program “Mechanic of Agricultural Machinery”, thanks to his mother, who mentioned it when signing the entry to the JZD. In the years 1961-1963 he completed basic military service, where during the Caribbean crisis he completed military training in Šumava. In the mid-1960s, he got married and started a family. Until 1980, he worked at the machine tractor station in Okřínek, then at the power plant in Poděbrady. After the 1989 coup, the family lands were returned to him and he started a business in agriculture. Even in his eighties, he manages 10 hectares of fields on which he grows grain.
