We were evicted to the borderlands, and our farm was meantime demolished
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František Zelinka was born on 5 April 1937 in Tunochody in the Vysočina Region. He grew up in a farming family of Roman Catholic belief. After a one-year school, he attended elementary school in Číhošť, later a town school in Zbýšov and then he worked at his father´s farm. On Sunday, 11 December 1949, he was present at Mass in the little church in Číhošť where the cross on the altar was swaying during the sermon by the priest Josef Toufar. His family farmed eighteen hectares of land. Since the beginning of the 1950s, his father was under pressure to join the United Agricultural Cooperative Tunochody which he kept refusing. The increase in agricultural supplies became unbearable. Because of not complying with the supplies, he was sentenced to spend one year in prison in 1951 and to spend eighteen months in prison in 1953. The sentence also included a lifelong ban on staying in the Ledeč nad Sázavou district, which led to the eviction of the family to the borderlands. Since then, the witness´s family lived with other kulak families in the settlement on Kohoutov (Hamber) near Javorník. The farm of the Zelinkas passed to the use of the United Agricultural Cooperative which had both the residential and agricultural parts of the building demolished and built a cow house there. Years later, the Zelinkas moved from the borderlands to the area of Kutná Hora where the witness´s parents worked as workers in agriculture, and they also spent the rest of their lives there. After 1989, his father was rehabilitated by the courts. František Zelinka worked in agriculture until his retirement. At the time of recording, he lived in the village of Polánka, Kutná Hora district (January 2022).
