Zdeněk Urban

“Most of the people understood the situation. There they were also liquidating them, and people later began to see through it, including the witnesses, because they were being forced to testify against us. And if you look at the statements I have here, most of them were adamant. But there was one Bolshevik, a bitch. She was working as a cleaner in the cowhouse. She returned from the interrogation. ´I stirred up trouble for those kulaks! They’ll go to Siberia now.´ But she didn’t even get home. She collapsed and remained lying there. Eyes popping out, mouth contorted, and turned up toes. She was just on her way to the cowhouse, eager to tell her coworkers how she made trouble for the kulaks. They won’t be back for a long time, she said. She was a dirty, lazy Bolshevik woman.”

“About the woman I mentioned – the one who collapsed in front of the cowhouse, with a contorted mouth and eyes popped out. There were more of them. More of them in such a small village. What kind of people are these?! On the date we were to make the required deliveries, she was crawling through our house and looking under the bed, in case we had the produce hidden there. There were people like this. You couldn’t make it. It was impossible to meet the quotas; they were raising them all the time. Requiring a delivery of 6000 kilograms of grain from ten hectares – here in the mountains. One was not able to meet this. The same with meat, milk. It was done on purpose to make us join the kolkhoz.”

“I got four years of imprisonment, Navrátil got six years, Janků seven years, Kvapil seven years and Bartoš one year.” Interviewer: “Did you expect the penalty to be so high?” - “We had been prepared for it. They had been training us and preparing us, we had to memorize our answers and we had been rehearsing it. We already did have some idea.”