Karel Fiedler

"The land still speaks to me to this day when I drive by and see how nicely ploughed and loosened everything is. Then I have memories of when my dad used to ride around with horses and a plough. It was endless. That's what I wanted to tell you about threshing corn. Today, a combine comes, pushes through, another car comes, gets grain on it, another car comes, pushes it through. When I was about eight years old, my mother and I had to go to the cornfield. They had invented reaper-binder by then, but before that there were mowers, they used to do it with scythes, but I don't remember that. My mother would go in after the mowing and tie the corn into these sheaves, and we would take it and build it up. Four or five of these sheaves were leaned against each other as a tent, and two sheaves were put on top as caps when it rained, so that it would flow down." "When it got dry, my father would come with horses and we'd load bundle after bundle up on the hay wagon all the way up to maybe three metres high. We'd take it to the shed. When the fields were all harvested, we had our own thresher. And threshing began. I'll never forget it. It was organized well. The whole family, except for grandfather and grandmother, went threshing. I handed the grain from the shed to my older sister, she untied it and gave it to my father and he put it in the threshing machine. He was wearing glasses because of the dust. And off it went - the grain, the sacks, in the back the straw went into this press that would stuff it into cardboard boxes or sheaves."

"I have a strong childhood memory from February 1945. I was not yet six years old. It was freezing cold, there was a lot of snow and the Germans had some trucks there, they drove around Řepov, and we as boys followed them. And they couldn't start the truck in the freezing weather. They came to our father to take the horses. He had a big gelding. They tied a chain around the horse, and went down a hill. The horse pulled the truck to start the frozen motor. It really worked, the horse started running and the motor started working. My father freed the horse and I cried like a baby. I was angry with the men for him staying in the truck. I felt sorry for the horse because I felt it was too much for the horse to pull. I still remember this."