František Škarda

* 1928

  • “The mental aspect was worse. Miners had it easier. They came home, ate their fill, went off for a beer or stretched out on the sofa; they had a family at home, a wife, but we were in permanent readiness. Say, it was Sunday, and they’d tell us we had standby duty and only those with visitors would get leave. That could happen four Sundays in a row. We didn’t get leave for a month. That’s how they exhausted us mentally. I obtained confirmation from the hospital that my father was fatally ill, and they didn’t let me go see him. Or they told us there was an imperialist threat. We made fun of it with the boys: ‘Boys, let’s go sharpen the spades and pick-axes, the imperialists are going to attack...’ And we were locked up in the barracks.”

  • “They had a new political officer there. That was around 1950. And he came to me and said: ‘Look, comrade, we need you as a reserve cadre. We’ll guarantee that you complete university, the director of Sokolov will be retiring in two years time, and you could take it over from him. In the meantime you’d work as his deputy.’ It was very tempting, I can’t say it wasn’t. I came home and told my father about it. That I had received this offer if I joined the Party. Dad said: ‘Don’t ever do it, because Communists are muck. They’d get you into their clutches and you’d be forced to do their dirty work, or they’d destroy you.’ So he explained it to me, and I refused the offer. Politely. So I refused it, and in the autumn I was drafted into the AEC [Auxiliary Engineering Corps - trans.], into the mines in Kladno.”

  • “In 1948 I applied to study at university. Then the February [coup] came. We didn’t take it so seriously at the time. We didn’t know what the onset of Communism actually meant. So I sent my application, and I received a cyclostyled sheet of yellow paper with just my address written in. I guess it wasn’t just me who got it. It said: ‘Seeing that we found that you do meet the requirements of the future socialist agriculture, you cannot be accepted to the University of Agriculture.’ So I drew a blank, so to say. I continued to work at the Machine and Tractor Station until military service.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Hroznová, EyeDirect, 16.08.2017

    (audio)
    délka: 02:56:46
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Memory of nations (in co-production with Czech television)
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The Communists would get you in their clutches and enslave you

Frantisek Skarda about 1954
Frantisek Skarda about 1954
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

František Škarda was born on 9 July 1928 in the solitude of Hájek near Lubenec in West Bohemia, where his father Šimon bought an estate in 1925 and started farming from scratch. After the Sudetes were annexed by Germany, the Škardas were forced to abandon their farm in 1940 and moved into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. They spent most of the war at the manor farm in Baldov near Domažlice, where his father was employed as administrator and where the family was liberated by the American army. From April 1945 they had sheltered 32 Hungarian Jews, who had escaped a transport near Domažlice; his father also hid three grounded pilots in the estate without the knowledge of his family. The witness provides a detailed description of the manoeuvres of the liberating American soldiers and the retreat of German units from Baldov. After the war the family returned to Hájek near Lubenec, but they found their farm in a desolate state. They received a different estate in Lubenec instead. However, the Communists confiscated it in 1951; the family moved to a small house and the father was banned from working in agriculture. František Škarda graduated from the Secondary School of Farming in Pilsen in 1947, but he was denied university studies of agriculture as the son of a „kulak“. When he refused an offer to join the Communist Party and become a „reserve cadre“ with the option to study at university, he was drafted into the Auxiliary Engineering Corps in 1950 and assigned to labour in the Kladno mines. He was released from the army in 1953, after his father‘s death. He then worked as an agronomist, a manual labourer, and a mechaniser. He is a Catholic from birth. He and his wife raised two children of their own and three adopted Romani children.