Dagmara Pavlátová

* 1939

  • "They didn't fix anything - when something fell, it fell - and when it was already very devastated, they took the cows elsewhere. They built cowsheds… And then they didn't need stables for horses because they already had tractors… they let the farms fall into ruins… A few were in favor, maybe thirty or twenty percent… but everyone who had a field and they took it from him was against it… everyone wanted their field, even if they only had small ones, they wanted to have them… And that's why they needed to move out large farms so that the unified collective farm could start somehow… and who was not in the collective farm… they took over a bit from Hitler… so they gave them huge taxes. From one hectare, they had to give away, I don't know how much barley, wheat… and when they had ten hectares, for example, they kept it until the last moment… When someone didn't have the dose because the harvest was not that good, the had to buy it so they could submit… for free, to the state. So, they clung to those fields so much, but gradually the collective farm expanded, they eventually killed them with the system. They had such large doses… and when it happened that someone did not submit the taxes, they locked them up…"

  • "When I was five years old - there was a war back then, in 1944 - my father was the mayor of the village. He had been mayor since he was twenty-four, when he was that age, he was elected for the first time and then elected every four years. Until 1948, then the communists came. My dad treated the people in the village as if they were his extended family. It never happened that someone would come up with something and he would not have time for him or her. He always had time and he always helped. And when there was a war, Hitler wanted to report how many communists there were in the village. And Dad always denied them, even though he knew they were here, and he always stood up for them and reported that they weren't here. And then my mother said after the war, 'You see, now they've evicted you to show you… and you were risking everything for them.'

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Údraž, 17.12.2018

    (audio)
    délka: 01:58:39
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Everything broke down in the 1950s

A photo of that time
A photo of that time
zdroj: archive of the witness

Dagmara Pavlátová was born on March 11, 1939 in Údráž in southern Bohemia into the family of the owner of the estate. Her father Václav Hrdlička was also the mayor of Údráž from 1925 to 1948. The family was running a farm and adjacent fields continuously since 1760. In 1949, Václav Hrdlička lost his left arm as a result of an accident and in the early 1950s, despite being disabled, he had to join a newly emerging unified agricultural cooperative. In good faith, he donated the farm and all the fields to the cooperative. The family could initially stay in the residential part of the farm, but they were no longer allowed to farm. After two years, Václav Hrdlička was expelled from the team. The reason was that he did not work the prescribed number of hours. He was ordered to move out of the district with his entire family. They had to do so within 48 hours, and from day to day they found themselves without a background. They asked the then president to stay at least in a house they set as an extension house, but their request was denied. Neither Dagmara nor her brother were allowed to study based on their class background. The farm returned to the family in 1990 as part of restitution in a devastated state. The witness began the reconstruction, which required a lot of investment and lasted for almost twenty years. In 2018, she returned to her native farm after decades.