“I spent 1968 at a state farm in Březová. The invasion took place at harvest time. Fields were being cut. The opinions varied. I said: ‘Guys, look, we have to harvest; nobody will do it for us. If we just discuss and blab here, we will gain nothing of it. We have to carry on harvesting.‘ So we did. The year 1968 passed by. A military unit drover through Březová but we kept on working somehow. Although some people had certain opinions, we weren’t affected by them.”
“When I worked as agricultural secretary, I had a partner district Kozolec in Ukraine. We were able to observe that in every country life is different, focusing on various things. One could of course see Leningrad being affected by the blockade and by what the people had to live through. We saw the level of development there and also the impact of the war. I recall that even at our place there was nothing after the war. Not even a cube of margarine. When a lady from Svitavy brought us a cube of margarine, I, my sister and my brother fought for being able to spread it on a slice of bread. So my assumption was that after the war some villages in Ukraine were also starting from point zero.”
“When I took the job at the farm in Březová, I was giving very clear statements on plenty of things, becoming a de facto speaker of a certain group of people. So they elected me head of the party organization there. I spoke up clearly at the party meetings as well as at the farm management, responding to problems and proposing solutions. And so after four years they elected me head of party committee at the farm. There they proposed I do an internship at the district Communist Party committee. I went there for six months and after five months they offered me to stay. At first, I had an internal struggle about it. But in the end I decided to give it a shot for a while. In any case, nobody was able to last there for long. But I didn’t know then that I would stay there for almost seventeen years, up until the revolution.”
František Ducháček was born on 22 June 1940 in a small village of Vitějeves. His family was poor, his father had five siblings and in order to buy them out and obtain a small family house he fell into debt for the rest of his life. The family made a living as farmers. František graduated from a mechanization school in Strážnice and found a job in the State Technical Supervision institution, overseeing agricultural collectives. He went through several workplaces. At the state farm in Březová he became the head of the local Communist Party unit. He agreed with the communist ideology, believing that under communism nobody would have to live in destitution and sweat anymore, as his parents did. He underwent an internship at the district committee of the Communist Party in Svitavy and then was named the district agricultural secretary which he did for seventeen years. Despite staying faithful to the communist thought, soon after the November 1989 revolution he went into business. He privatized small shops and canteens and established a fur animal farm.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
