Miroslav Chromý

“I don't remember what year it was, probably 1953, at the time of the founding of agricultural cooperatives. I was already the head of production, but they dragged me out, saying there was a more important political function for me to do. I had to go to Čejkovice and start founding a cooperative. When I arrived there, I could hardly tell the wheat from the rye, but I was the one founding the cooperative. The chairman there was Mr Drbohlav, and the secretary was this dirty elderly man, and I used to go back and forth between them. I didn't know what to do there. So I always borrowed a horse from chairman Drbohlav, he harnessed the horse for me, and I took a hay turner, for example, and rode around the meadows turning the hay. We mowed and put it into stacks by hand back then. Combine harvesters didn't exist yet, there were only mowers. So I worked there as a farmer to pass the time. There was nothing else to do, there was a pub, but I was never a pub person - to just sit somewhere. So I helped them, and the chairman Drbohlav was a nice gentleman, and in the fall, they told me that they would give me a pig. But I had nothing to feed him, so they also gave me several bags of corn for him. I brought the pig to Bílsko to live at my grandmother’s, we raised him there and let him grow up. He had a good life there.”

“Suddenly, I see Zdeněk coming towards me, so I ask him, ‘Zdeněk, what are you doing here? I wouldn't have expected that we would meet after so many years.’ And he answered me that he was coming from Valdice, from the prison. So we went to my house, I made him coffee, and we had a snack. I asked about how he got into prison - what did he do? And he told me that he was the general director of Northern Bohemian Coal Mines– but then there were various checks during the Slánský trial, who was accused of high treason and sentenced to death. So he appealed, and the next court reduced his sentence to life imprisonment. He appealed again. It dragged on for several years, and in the end, his sentence was reduced to twenty years. And by then, he has served half of his sentence, so they let him go. He went home to see his wife in Lebáň, where she lived with her parents. I asked what he was going to do, but he wasn't worried about not getting a job - he was a university student and could speak German. After three months, Zdeněk showed up again. And when I asked what he was doing, he answered that he was working at Textilana in Liberec as a cultural executive and that he was going to Vysoké Mýto to pick up a bus they bought so they could go on trips.”