"I was furiously persuaded by the director of the state farm to join communism, but somehow that was out of the question. So I explained to him that when the Jizera river flows from Příšovice to Turnov, I would join them, but since it had never flowed before, I didn't join them, well. Somehow it was quite... look, you had to get used to it. It just wasn't possible, well."
"That was September 1, these are the papers for that. So if not every day, then every other day there was a secret one to see if we were fighting against socialism. We were there for about six months, or maybe it didn't take that long... They came to my dad that they needed him to go to Jablonec, to Rychnov, to work as an agronomist. He said he wasn't going anywhere. So he was there for nine years, and then he was at Maxov for about two more years as head of the farm. And my mother fed the bulls in the barn. The cows and all that got moved out and there were thirty-five bulls, well, she was in charge of that."
"About two months before the war ended, this Russian woman brought us about five Russian soldiers who had escaped from the Germans. So they stayed with us for about a month, which was no fun, because if the Germans had found out, they would have shot us all. Well, and when the front was coming, they disappeared and he was with us... then she brought another one, this Julča, he was an eighteen-year-old Ukrainian, a boy named Peter, and he was with us until the end of the war, almost. Or then when they came here, he joined them."
Jiří Hübner was born on 19 February 1940 in Turnov and lived most of his life in Svijanský Újezd, where his parents had a farm. At the end of the war his family hid Russian soldiers. In September 1950 their farm was nationalized and the Hübners had to move out of their house. Dad was sent to work outside the village and mum was moved to another house with her three children. He graduated from the Secondary Agricultural School in Turnov and after his military service he joined the state farm in Mnichovo Hradiste as a zootechnician and later as a mechanic in Svijanský Újezd. He married and had three children. After the Velvet Revolution, the unified agricultural cooperative broke up, but the farmers agreed to found Agro Rubín, where they continued farming together. The witness worked for Agro Rubín as a mechaniser. Jiří Hübner died in 2024.
