Ladislav Zapletal

"In the fifties, when my father was still at home, it was the most absurd fine we got. We were also ordered to deliver potatoes, about twenty or thirty yards. So, we had it sacks up and taken I to the place to hand it over. They told us to deposit it in the barracks - and they gave us a receipt. A week later the town radio reported, but at nine o'clock in the evening, when we were already asleep. They said that my father and others were to come to the national committee, that people in Prostějov didn't have potatoes and that we had to give them. My father said that we had already made the delivery earlier, that it didn't concern us. The comrade from the national committee responded that the people were more important than the pigs and that we had to give it. So, we brought it out of the cellar and took it away. My father was then fined fifty thousand crowns in the old currency! They took it themselves, everything went through the savings bank and they knew how much money we had in there. So, we didn't have enough to pay the people who worked for us."

"In 1951, my father was arrested for sabotage for the first time. The sabotage was that the Rudé právo wrote that they would buy agricultural machinery from everyone and then give it to farmers according to the allocation of electricity, for example, for threshing. It had already been done in other villages, so my parents knew what it looked like. The tractor driver came to our place, opened the gate and took out the tractor, took out the thresher, all the machines. It was just the stuff for the tractor, they didn't want tools for the horses. We had number 6, we were on the edge of the village. They took it out to the square, all the machinery was already there. My dad went to see what they had taken from us. And they left us an electric motor. It was heavy, on wheels. We had two, and they left one there, and the one they left there had a cracked socket. It was porcelain with a Bakelite cover and it was repaired with wire. So, my father dismantled it and went to the village to exchange it with the second one it. The tractor driver saw him and went to turn him in. The national committee shouted at him that it was sabotage. They called a police officer, handcuffed him and led him through the village with handcuffs as a murderer. He was locked up in a remand prison in Prostějov from July to December, without trial."