Vít Kvapil

“I wrote my parents. I experienced something in Chrastice because I went to see farmers who I knew and who had horses - I always liked horses. And I experienced what they did to those farmers. Because there were either villages or fields in South Bohemian Region and there was for example a farm in the middle of it. Well and mainly people from Prague who were horrible evicted the farmers to forests during collectivization. If a woman was wearing something gold, they took it away from her. Watch, everything. And they took them to a forest. They did not care about how they would live. They were not allowed to return there.”

“Victorious February? My dad said that it was a disaster. It was dangerous. Because what communists managed to do due to the Soviet Union was to ruin the nation. They made villages and everything poor. Because they announced: ‘Who is not with us, is against us!‘ And everything belonged to everyone and nothing belonged to anyone. And so it ended like this. I think that it was the biggest disaster that people experienced here. In my opinion.”

“Germans were asking for an awful lot of ratios, they made everything very strict but otherwise we had a German mayor. His name was Slezák, if that is true I don’t know now. And he was not too bad. There was a dancing room here in the changing room as it was. He always came to have a look and said:,Darken the windows would you, so that they do not see and turn it down.´ And if someone was killing an animal, a young cow or something, he was always there. He would always say:,You cannot do that without me.‘ As people tell on each other and they do the same today as they did back then.“

“Well and then some kind of a chap in the region or someone envious was asking about the fact I left to cooperative so I had to attend a meeting in Šumperk and some Fojt from Hoštejn was talking about the fact a man, who was born here in agriculture left here and went to engineering. So they let me choose from about five companies. And so I took a bike to return to the ditch in but I met a friend, who worked in Prefa in Postřelmov before and he said: ,Come and join us, it is constructions too after all!‘ So I went there and the director in Prefa was called to the region and said: ,I did not know that so I hired him.‘ So I never left from there.“