Josef Vlk

"As a kid, I was twelve or thirteen, [when] I used to run seven kilometres to school in the morning, I had a milk can with some juice in it. At home, we processed all the fruit that was worth anything and we made juice out of it. It was very easy to sell at the market. I was carrying three litres, and in the second bag I had some cake, and I sold it all in ten minutes and then I ran to school." - "How much moeny did you make on that trip to school?" - "As much as I needed, that's how much I made. I also handed some money in at home."

"What did you know about Czechoslovakia, were you interested?" - "There was a lot of talk, stories. My grandfather and sometimes the younger ones got to go to the Sokol meetings and festivals. For example, when it was the anniversary of the Battle of Zborov. There was a celebration every now and then. We had the advantage of having a married aunt in Kladno. So they went to Boratín quite often, and the students went for studies... For example, the youngest Vlk graduated from a secondary pedagogical school in Kladno. And my aunt trained as a seamstress there."

"This 'why' must be said only by someone who has no idea what the Volhynians experienced. The Bander´s army, the Bolsheviks, who always saw us as legionaries. And the Bolsheviks couldn't accept it, what was happening to them, that they were getting beaten up wherever they went. Lenin said, 'If you see a Czech who has something like a pistol or firearm, shoot him mercilessly´. That was the order, then, when Lenin was already almost in an agony."

"They knew that there would be a pressure to establish a kolkhoz [Soviet cooperative farm, trans. ] there, and all people from Boratín were against it, and they stood up to it, too. They were like everyone else who didn't join and set up a kolkhoz. They were on the list of people to be sent to Siberia. Fortunately, those who were listed as enemies were many, and so we were lucky that Boratín was saved by one day." - "How come by one day?" - "Well, because the next day the Germans came." - "Were you packed?" - "No. We didn't know about it. We didn't know it was our turn. I remember once when I went to see my grandfather at Podhajce, where the station was, and there I saw a train carriage without a roof, and there were those who were being exported with small bags. It wasn't just the Czechs. It was Poles, intellectuals and everybody who had a bad record."

"The departure was as chaotic as anything the Russians did, without any order. We were all ready. Our things were not in suitcases, but in such boxes that were stacked at the same height to serve as beds. We were taking useless things, like cows. I'll tell you what my home was like on that train. I was with the cows and the horses. It stank there, but I was my own boss. I could open the door to see out. It was my first time on a train, my first time seeing the mountains. It was the first time I experienced a night in the mountains - in that wagon where I was guarding to make sure that the horses weren't taken, killed."

“They finished the construction of the church in 1951. There was nothing, no building material, no whitewash. They were pulling out nails from planks and straightening them and reusing them. There are written records about old grandpas who were pulling out the nails and straightening them, and they have reused over ten thousand nails. They counted them all. In 1950 I submitted documents for the roof construction of the brickworks in Chotíněves to the architect, and this was used for the construction of the church roof. I have to tell you how it actually happened that the authorities allowed the building of the church, because after February 1948 something like this was unacceptable. The priest actually had to be a great tactician when he managed to obtain the building permit. He promised them that he would establish a cooperative in Chotíněves in exchange for permission to build a church there. He never mentioned it. He died one year after the cooperative had been founded, but it was founded by others, not by him. He even obtained a subsidy of three hundred thousand Crowns. I think that the budget for the church was around one million and a half, and he managed to get this subsidy of three hundred thousand. He was also a liaison between the Czechs from Boratín and the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian rebel army, and therefore he already must have had experience with these dictatorship regimes. He was certainly a good psychologist as well, that’s what a priest needs to know. Therefore this was a small miracle.”

“There was a requirement that no more than one third of property may be owned by Volhynians or by some foreign users or administrators. This was quite tough, because the villages were scattered over large areas. And the community of Volhynian Czechs there was based mostly in villages. There were friendly relationships, it was a homogenous community. I still don’t know how they managed to keep it this way. In Chotiněves, there were eventually 17 of them, although there were only 40 farms, and 17 out of 40 were owned by them, although actually it should have been only 13 farms.”

“One carriage was to carry about ten people. In our case it was for three families. Since it was not possible to communicate with the men from the family (who were already in Czechoslovakia) about what was needed to bring, we therefore took everything with us, but I think it was not necessary. Hens, cows, horses, pigs… A farmer is reluctant to get rid of these animals which provide a living to man. I was fourteen years old, and I rode in a cattle truck. That was the best, because there was plenty of space, and I had a window just for myself and I could keep the door partly open. I saw mountains for the first time in my life. We passed through the Carpathian Mountains at the end of February. It was freezing. The journey took twelve days. We boarded the train in the town of Luck. It was nice when we were leaving the town. We were riding on a track which was about one kilometre from the village which we were leaving behind. We were passing through that place in the evening, the sun was setting and was shining on the church and the roofs. The pines which grandpa had planted were glowing, and nearby there was the graveyard, which had a special importance for us. During the ten days when the train was riding through the Ukrainian territory, at every railway station, when the door opened, there were beggars extending their hands to us, begging us to give them this or that. They were interested in getting our clothing for free, because they knew that we were going to a better place. It was the other way round here. We arrived and on the border they welcomed us with tea and hot soup.”

“When the Soviets came in 1939, I was seven years old. I don’t remember it directly. There was a political officer who came from the Soviet territory, and who was to do the ideological propaganda there. The clever Czechs even tried to win his favour, offering him food and drink and he was becoming more pliable. But he had to leave, because he was gradually accepting the opinions of these –alleged –enemies of the Soviet regime. A total of three political officers were sent to serve there. Right after the Soviets came they began promoting the socialization of the countryside, the kolchoz and sovchoz cooperatives. Moreover, in Boratín it was even more tense, because strong religious ideology was still was prevalent there, and Stalin and his supporters did not like it. Their ideology was to crush private entrepreneurship, and the exploitation of man by another man, although this was arguably beneficial for the native population there. When they came there in 1939 they immediately sent all state officials and those who owned more than 100 hectares of land to Siberia.”

“J. V.: “Both of us were born in Poland, I was born in 1932 and you (his wife) in 1936.” A.V.: “Our village was a bit different, because it was an evangelical village. Not only they didn’t want to marry Ukrainians, but they didn’t even want to marry Czechs who had converted to the Orthodox Church. 75% of them converted to the Orthodox Church and the evangelicals then despised them pretty much.”