Ladislav Zapletal

* 1936

  • "After the forty-eighth year they took first large farms, show land, about thirty acres in size, built of brick. First of all, they liquidated them economically and financially. There were two prices, but in fact three. One, when they prescribed how much grain you had to hand over, these were prices below the cost of production. The other price was the so-called free market price, but you had to give that to the purchase, to the slaughterhouse or to the dairy. You couldn't sell it anywhere else. And they were liquidating them with big deliveries and little money. They already knew how things worked in Russia. They made a cooperative, and its chairman was a Krejčí from Prostějov who didn't understand it. After a year, the cooperative broke up. So, they seized other estates and made another cooperative, and it was the same thing, it broke up again."

  • "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."

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    Louny, 15.08.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:41:48
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Příběhy regionu - Ústecký kraj
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

I do not like the communists, they bullied us, they arrested my father repeatedly for no reason

Graduation of the witness, with his wife Markéta and daughter Hana in 1968
Graduation of the witness, with his wife Markéta and daughter Hana in 1968
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Ladislav Zapletal was born in 1936 in the Prostějov region into a farmer‘s family. Mum and dad looked after a small farm. At the end of the World War II, in May, an artillery shell landed in the farm yard, killing several people. In 1949, the family‘s farm machinery was confiscated, and the witness’s father ended up in jail for alleged sabotage. In the mid-1950s, the father was jailed a second time for failing to comply with mandatory farm deliveries. Ladislav Zapletal was not allowed to graduate from high school. Instead, he had to look after the family farm with his mother Ludmila Zapletalová. After returning from the compulsory military service, he graduated from an agricultural secondary school. Later, he also graduated from the agricultural college and worked for seventeen years in a cooperative in Lišany in the Louny region. In 1968, under repeated pressure, he joined the Communist Party and was expelled from it a year later. After 1989 he got back land in Prostějov region in restitution. He leased them to private farmers. He became director of the Regional Department of the Ministry of Agriculture for the Rakovník-Louny area. In 2002 he retired and devoted himself to gardening. In 2022 he lived in Louny. We were able to record the story of the witness thanks to support from the town of Louny.