Antonín Konečný

* 1959

  • "Milokošt' was sacrificed for the most part. You understand. Because they needed to relieve Hodonin so that it wouldn't get so much water. Let me put it very simply. I rode the Arab, I had mapped every place where the Morava flows. Day and night I was on horseback. I drove all over. The night before the water poured into Milokošt', the night before I went to Veselí, I called Mr. Kůřil, the coordinator of the floods, and the mayor of the town. I talked to them and I said, 'Give me the material, I'll get the people and we'll keep the water.' They said, 'No way. In the morning the soldiers will come.' I said, 'In the morning you can all go fuck yourselves!' because I knew what was going on. The water was flowing, the dam was breaking for many hours. It wasn't a matter of moments. There started a trickle that got bigger and bigger. At one o'clock at night it broke. When I saw it from a distance, I didn't ride up to it because it was already wet. I rode straight home. I had fifteen horses in the house. Mares with little foals. I had an orchard behind me where I had the chains ready to tie them to the trees. I'll let them drown. I called the village, said the water had broken. Nobody cared. I said, 'What about the cattle in the village?' Someone told me, I don't know who, that they didn't care, that we should take care of it ourselves. So I went to the chairman of the cooperative, to Janik. I said, 'Karel, you have to open a four-rower for us, we have to get the cattle out of the villages. There will be water there by morning. All night long we took the cattle away, and the people. I've got all the horses. I more or less arranged that. I'd go around the village, wake people up to drive the cars away. Until the soldiers arrived in the morning. By that time, the village was knee-deep in water. The water was going so fast, you could just walk in front of it. It followed you."

  • "I believe there were a lot of people who were set on me and tried to hurt me in some way. I can tell you such incidents that when I was harvesting for people with a combine harvester, I took a hundred crowns for a patch. He gave me the money, got on his bicycle and rode to the municipality to denounce me for taking a hundred crowns, and if I could take that much and if I paid the carriage tax on it, and they had such talk. The women in the village told me, they knew my mother very well, we got on very well together, so I found out all this. The next year I went again to do the harvest for him, but I took 150 crowns to let him know."

  • "When I was leaving school I had a contract to go to Strážnice to an agricultural secondary school. I already had everything signed, the papers. My mother got some friends, so through the cooperative, I guess, Petrov for me, I would learn for that cooperative, that I would be a mechanic for them in time, but who knows. And a week before the end of the holidays I got a letter from the district committee of the Communist Party that they were stopping all my education. So the whole month of September I was at home. Then my mother told me again that I could go to the tractor factory in Veselí to learn. With the condition that I had to live there. In my first year, I had to live in a dormitory two kilometers from home. I tell you, when I got there at the beginning of October, the headmaster let all the apprentices in. He let me out of the line and for about ten minutes he told me that I was the son of a kulak and how he had to re-educate me. Several times during that apprenticeship he called me into the headmaster's office. Maybe every six months. He spent an hour convincing me not to help my parents, to rub themselves down. He tried to influence me somehow. How do I put this... By then, I understood it all, the way life is. I felt sorry for some of these people, how they made fools of themselves."

  • "I'll tell you later. In the sixth grade we started taking Russian. I told the Russian teacher that I wasn't going to learn Russian, that she should accept it. So she threatened me that I would fail. I'm gonna fail. Then she went along with it, and instead of Russian, I did my math homework. My grades weren't too bad. I was very good at math. She got used to it. When the inspector came, she gave me an excuse: 'Tonda, don't come to school for two days so that I don't get kicked out of the school system because you don't know Russian.' She would give me a four in maths, I had the worst grade, so I could just pass and be done with it. She put up with it. It was quite good. But there were teachers who fought against me. In third or fourth grade, we had to draw what we wanted to do in life. They all drew rockets and tanks. I drew a wagon with horses, riding horses. I'm sixty-four years old, none of them are astronauts, and I ride horses all the time. That's when my mother had to go to school. Because they only dealt with it in the headmaster's office in Veselí, that I was being brought up against socialism."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Uherské Hradiště, 10.12.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:44:36
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - JMK REG ED
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The communists taught us to renounce our own parents. I couldn‘t accept that.

Period portrait of Antonín Konečný
Period portrait of Antonín Konečný
zdroj: archive of a witness

Antonín Konečný was born on 20 June 1959 in Uherské Hradiště to parents Ctirada and Antonín Konečný. He spent his childhood on the farm in Milokošt‘, which the family had been farming for two hundred years. They lost most of the horses from the farm during the liberation in 1945, and faced further pressure because of their unwillingness to sign the application to the JZD (Unified agriculture cooperative). Because of this, Antonín Konečný was considered a class enemy and the son of a kulak. After primary school, the district committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia initially stopped all further education for him, but he eventually took an apprenticeship at the secondary vocational school in Veselí nad Moravou. However, he was obliged to live in a dormitory so that he could not help his parents on the farm. After his father‘s death in 1978, Antonín Konečný took over the family farm. He was interrogated several times about the illegal purchase of a combine harvester. In 1984 he left the folklore ensemble Ostrožan, where he had been active for ten years - since he was fifteen. He had reason to suspect that someone from the group was informing on him. In July 1997, he witnessed a devastating flood that also inundated Milokošt‘. Around the year 2000, Antonín Konečný married and raised two children with his wife. Even today (2022) he is still involved with horses. He passes this craft on to his son Jakub.