Ing. Jan Zeťek

“The peasants in the villages were obliged to hand over huge deliveries of their produce, massive levies. Now, my father had acquired a lot of knowledge about agriculture while he had been working at some cooperative farm in Polabí region where his uncle, Bohumil Hájek I believe, had been the director. And my father brought this know-how to Zádveřice. He became a reputable expert on cattle farming and crops production and these state-imposed levies, it was simply impossible to meet them, and so my father ended up in prison in Uherské Hradiště twice. That must have been sometimes between 1951 and 1954. And my mother was left alone with young kids. She was mostly coping, but we had a bad cow in the barn which wouldn’t let her milk her as she was used to my father. So let me mention a noble neighbour, his name was Jan Mikeska, born in 1907, who used to come and milk the wayward cow for us. Well, those were difficult times. And my father’s imprisonment, that was also for failure to deliver levies, the sentence was usually a few weeks. He didn’t stay away for a long time, but still he was dearly missed.”

“During the war, my father was involved in resistance movement in Chrudim region. I don’t know the full story, ‘cos he wasn’t in the habit of talking about himself. His father was a legionary who spent six years in Russia, spoke fluent Russian and didn’t come back to his homeland until 1921. Our house stood by itself on the bank of a stream which is a tributary of the Chrudimka river and two Russian POWs who had escaped from some German camp found refuge at ours. In the end, one local guy turned them in, but they managed to escape thanks to the nearby forest. Some fifteen years later one of them came to see my granddad and thanked him for the refuge during the war. As far as my father is concerned, I know that during some sabotage he managed to save his life by jumping into the overflowing Chrudimka and swimming to the other side. Later, when he had retired, my mother reproached him for not applying for the resistance fighters’ compensation which would have got him a bonus on top of his pension. And he lost his temper and said: ,Do you know who turned us in that time and reported the two Russians we were hiding? That very same comrade who did so is now some mayor or other powerful party official, and I should be asking him to testify for me?’ And so he refused to apply for the compensation.”