“Once again, I was lucky. They signed me up as a dog handler. Hang on, not that, as an artillerist, an anti-tank gunner. In those days, though, the army was running these auxiliary farms in order to make use of the scraps, such as from peeling the potatoes etc. There were about seventy of us in the company, so three times a week you had to go and peel the potatoes. There was a lot of peels, so we kept pigs to use it up. When I joined, though, no one there knew anything about keeping pigs. The farm was in a sorry state. The authorities wanted the farm up and running and we used to have farm animals at home, so I knew how to do it. Before I started, the pigs sometimes ate and sometimes didn’t, there was no system to it. The cook asked what I had done before the army. “Farming,” said I. “And wouldn’t you like to do it here?” he asked. It wasn’t too difficult, there were only about ten pigs or so. I said: “They’re sending me down to Zvolen in Slovakia to an officer school.” And he says: “And would you be interested?” – “Why not?” said I. – “Alright, I’ll speak to the commander, and they’ll replace you.” And so I stayed with the company and it was clear sailing for me the whole military service. I had it easy.”
“I was eight years old at the time, and there was no chance we’d go swimming to the lake or playing with other kids. My sister was lying in the hospital, which you had to pay for in those days, but we had very little money. So, we had to work the fields. My father sat me on top of the horse-drawn mower, I directed the horses, and he was making the bales and binding the sheaves. Everyone had to contribute, no one had any excuses.”
“We had to hand in milk, meat – both pork and beef, eggs – and when there was cereal, even that. There were quotas on how much milk my parents had to take to the dairy. We were allowed one pig a year, and if you didn’t meet the required quota of food to be handed in, they didn’t even let us kill that pig. So, there was no meat, everything was rationed, shops were empty. As for flour, my parents would have our cereal, both barley and wheat, ground and my mum would make the dough for the bread in a thing called bread trough and take it to the baker for baking. We’d have about nine kilos of bread, which would last us a week. Butter? I didn’t know what it was until I was twelve, thirteen. Luckily, once a year my parents slaughtered a pig, and so we had some lard and meat. That’s how we lived, frugally.”
Ladislav Gardavský was born on August 21, 1944, in Kojetín. As a baby of just a few months, he spent the final stage of World War II with his parents in a cellar shelter. From a young age, he was helping the parents on their family farm, which was confiscated after they had been coerced to join the new co-operative farm. In the late fifties, their fields and livestock got taken over by the communists. Ladislav Gardavský completed his primary school and then went on to a vocational school of agriculture in Kojetín. After graduation, he started working in the “JZD” – the agricultural cooperative farm – tending the land which had originally been his family’s. Between 1963-1965, he did his military service in Dobčice in the České Budějovice region. During his service, he was put in charge of the local auxiliary farm, or “PZH”, which made his time in the military easier. After his service, he returned to the co-op in Kojetice and stayed there until the Velvet Revolution. In the 1990s, he managed to get his family land back. At the time of the interview in 2021, he was still living at the family farm in Kojetice.
