The communists have succeeded in the total destruction of the peasantry
Stáhnout obrázek
Antonín Kerner was born on 20 July 1937 into the family of a farmer Josef Kerner in Smolnice, Lounsko. The Kerner family had been cultivating land there since the middle of the 17th century. He experienced the arrival of the so-called national guests, ethnic Germans from Eastern, South-Eastern and Central Europe fleeing the Red Army advance during the war. He also remembers the arrival of the Red Army of Liberation. In the late 1940s and 1950s, during agricultural collectivization, his father was imprisoned for six months for failing to meet mandatory deliveries, and later he and his mother were convicted of sabotage. The mother received a suspended sentence, and the father was sentenced to three years in prison. After three months, the father was finally released, but he had to work in an agricultural cooperative. The witness and his sister were not allowed to study at the secondary agricultural school, so they both entered the chemical apprenticeship in Meziboří. In the sixties, the witness left the chemical factory in Záluží for an agricultural purchasing company in the Lounsko region. In 1969 the family regained one of the houses that belonged to their farm. In the 1970s, he worked at the Louny Porcelain Factory. At the beginning of the new millennium, he was the mayor of Smolnice, where he was living at the time of the filming (2024) and devoted himself to his hobbies, especially his garden.
