“Flunkies – we called them flunkies – were coming there from the district administration office: they were waiting in front of our house until we arrived from the field at around eight o’clock in the evening, tired after all-day’s work. They came to the cattle-shed and they enquired how much milk we got from the cows and whether we were not hiding some milk or butter. One day mom got so angry that she told them: ‘If you don’t leave, I will stab you with that pitchfork.’ She was holding the pitchfork in her hands. She was so enraged that she would probably do it. That would have gotten us into trouble...”
“After the summer holiday he began studying law at the faculty, but then there was the February 1948 and other political purges followed. Students who did not come from working class families or who did not hold the materialist worldview did not have any chance to complete their studies. Even the teachers who were inconvenient for the communist regime were being expelled. The examining professor thus advised them at the end of summer vacation in 1948: those of you who can should prepare for the state examinations – that would be your last opportunity for the exam. The teachers themselves already suspected that the students would not have a chance to complete their studies. My husband told me that he did not think that he was sufficiently prepared, but he took his chances nonetheless. His other schoolmates who were more hesitant and who thought that they would not pass the exam then never received their university degrees.”
“I think of the following verses from the poem of our poet Viktor Dyk ‘The Land Speaks:’ How come you have forgotten your inheritance? Why did you hesitate and why did you betray? How could you consciously do the cursed deed? You could betray yourself. But betray your descendants? Why have you surrendered while you were breathing? What did you fear? What is death? Death means coming to me. Your mother earth opening her arms: how come you would defy her? You will learn how soft is the land for those who completed what they were expected to do. Your mother is begging you: Protect me, my son! Go, even if you walk to death with difficulty. If you leave me, I will not die, if you leave me you will die!”
Dobromila Kvasničková grew up on a farm in Chrášťany near Hulín where her family owned a medium-sized homestead. She attended a higher elementary school in Hulín and then continued at a one-year agricultural school in Litenčice. Persecutions of independent farmers began after 1950 as part of the forced collectivization process. As a result, the family was evicted to the Vysočina region and all their property became confiscated by a local Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD). The family‘s financial situation became even worse due to the currency reform in 1953. In 1958 Dobromila married and she moved to Jihlava with her husband and the rest of the family. She successfully took her secondary school-leaving exam when she was forty-two years old. The confiscated property was returned to the family in restitution after 1989 but their farm was in a very derelict state. Dobromila has four children and she still lives in Jihlava.
