Jiří Černý

* 1930

  • "The first thing was they were going to do the cooperative. My father was locked up, I was in the army, only my mother and my sister were there, and they came and told us that they were taking it over and that we had to move out, and they moved us out. We still had a deputy's house opposite our farm and my mother moved into the deputy's house there. What she could take, she moved out. My sister Jindřiška and my cousins helped her. The worst thing was when my mother saw them wrecking everything and stealing everything that was available to steal. They didn’t really know how to manage things well, and in the end, they did something like that. They had a poor harvest and wanted to blame my father, saying he plowed over the clods, such a ...”

  • "We experienced the Germans in the displacement camps. There were still some Germans who worked for the Czechs or were of Czech nationality. We were in contact with them. Then there were new people who occupied the place, people who ran the office there. We had one classmate who went to the collection camps and traded with them. But most of us didn't get there, we could go there, but we didn't seek them out. The situation in the camps was bad. They weren't allowed to take anything with them. We got to the villages next door, there were farms. Everything, as they left, everything stayed there. They could only take money and the equipment stayed there, it was all destroyed."

  • "Well, it turned out... He was locked up in Pankrác, and through some connection, because there was a German woman in Škorec, she helped those who were locked up. She got some goose, she intervened too, so then he was released. I don't know exactly what she was. She was of German nationality, but she spoke Czech. My mother has this experience that when my father was in Pankrác, when the Germans arrested him, so she went there to see him and wanted to give him some laundry so that he would have a clean change of clothes. That sort of passed and it was all right. And when my father was locked up under the Communists, they treated her like a pariah. She said, 'The Germans treated me better than our people'."

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    Brandýs nad Labem, 13.07.2020

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    délka: 02:14:59
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He was supposed to inherit the family farm, but they made him praise the JZD (Unified Agriculture Cooperative)

Jiří Černý during his high school studies in Kadan in 1947
Jiří Černý during his high school studies in Kadan in 1947
zdroj: archive of Jiří Černý

Jiří Černý was born on 14 April 1930 in Dobročovice, a village east of Prague. His father, Jindřich Černý, was a farmer and mayor of Dobročovice for the Agrarian Party. During the Second World War, a neighbour turned his father and other men from Dobročovice over to the Gestapo. His father ended up in Pankrác prison for about three months and then was released. In 1946, Jiří Černý entered the four-year Higher School of Agriculture in the North Bohemian town of Kadana and experienced the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans and saw their devastated and plundered farms. After 1948, the communist regime seized the Černýs‘ family farm and other property. Jiří Černý was finishing his studies and his father was arrested for speaking over the grave of his neighbour Prokůpek. He was released early from the camp in Jáchymov because he was given a suspended sentence. Jiří Černý spent the war in a non-commissioned officers‘ school and later as a private. After the war, he worked in a construction company as a foreman, electrician‘s assistant and also as a maintenance worker in Laktos Brandýs nad Labem. He married and had one stepchild and one child of his own with his wife. Until 1989 he was not politically involved in any way, until 25 November 1989 he took part in a large demonstration on Letná plain. After 1989, he and his sister applied for the return of the farm confiscated after 1948 and got it back, but it was very devastated. His son Petr managed it for ten years. In 2020 Jiří Černý lived in Brandýs nad Labem.