Ing. Zdeněk Horák

* 1944

  • “Before father was ordered to go for that special army training, he had had a surgery in Brno due to stomach ulcers, and they had removed a quarter of his stomach. He had to be on a strict diet, but regardless of that, the comrades invited him for an extra training in Komárno, where obviously they didn’t care about any diet for him. Rum, cigarettes, etc., affected his health. From Komárno they sent them to Poprad, then they had to move to Prešov, then to Pardubice. One guy from Prostějov died in Poprad; he was accidentally buried by some debris. I think that Mr. Přidal (Jan Přidal) describes it well in his book. When my father did not keep the diet, the disease came back. He was very sick. Local farmer, Mr. Moural (Karel Moural), who was there with him, asked the head doctor in Poprad. He said: ´Sir, I beg you, you see for yourself that Zdeněk is really totally devastated. You should sign his release.´ The doctor told him: ´Mr. Moural, I would do it, but I cannot. Because this man has a note in his papers from the municipal committee: His return is not desirable.´ So father was basically sent there as an unwanted man. He was sent there to be destroyed.”

  • “Wagons and the carriage. And the sledge carriage remained there. As we were sitting on the wagon, our grandmother, her legs were weak and she wasn’t able to climb up on the wagon, walked by leaning on her crutches. My mom and my two-year-old sister were sitting on the wagon, and Josef Mlčoch, a man from the part of the village where the poor lived, a shoemaker’s son from the family of Leoš Mlčoch, grapped a whip from the wall and swung it around and yelled: ´Get the fuck out!´ I still remember this and I told him this. He has been dead for some twenty or twenty-five years now. I told him about it once in the pub. He stared at me: ´I remember it exactly, you bastard.´ And he died within a month.”

  • “They saw that it was hopeless and so they sent father home some time in January. He died as a result of it on April 20, 1953. He died in house No. 11, where we were forced to move. They didn’t even allow us to accompany him on his last journey from our own farm. The funeral basically turned into a peasants’ demonstration. I have photograph from the funeral. An awful lot of people gathered there. And the communists disliked this gathering of so many people, I remember that, I was eight… This Mr. Hruška, who worked at the airport – there were planes flying low over the cemetery so that you couldn’t hear anything. We couldn’t even hear the words of the priest.”

  • “On Sunday in August 1968, when the tanks were riding around, I and my friend, who had got me a job in the Industrial Construction Company in Brno, were together after a night of partying. I slept in his place the day before the shooting in Prostějov. It happened at the end of Plumlovská Street in Krasice. Around two o’clock we walked to the town and all of a sudden, the Russians were riding through Prostějov and suddenly they began shooting from the town square to the Plumlovská Street. Every tenth round was tracer round, and I had already done my army service, but I have never experienced such fear in my life as when the shots were flying past me. I slammed my body to the ground and I waited until it was over. The shooting went right past me until the tanks passed by. That’s where they shot Langr. (Ladislav Langer – author’s note). And before that, they had shot that woman in front of the door (Marie Říhovská – auth.’s note)”

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    Vyšovice, 27.11.2013

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He grabbed a whip from the wall, swung it and shouted: Get out!

Zdeněk Horák as a young man
Zdeněk Horák as a young man
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

  Ing. Zdeněk Horák was born in 1944 in Vyšovice in the Prostějov region. Most of the villagers were earning their living by farming before, but their life was forcibly interrupted by the collectivization of the countryside which was imposed by the communist regime. The Horák family owned the second largest farm in the village, and when they refused to join the cooperative during this process, his father, who was convalescing after a difficult surgery, was ordered to participate in an extraordinary military drill. He died as a consequence of the army exercise shortly after his return. When he was away for this army training, his wife was taking care of two little children and failed to deliver the prescribed quota of agricultural products for the state. In January 1953 she was sentenced for endangering the state economic plan to a penalty of 20,000 Crowns and to two months of imprisonment if she did not pay. The family was then forced to move out of their farm to a damp flat on the other side of the village. They had a difficult time making ends meet. After their father‘s death, Zdeněk‘s mother was not getting enough food stamps and in the currency reform in 1953 she lost the remaining money which she had been saving. The frequent checks on the family by the State Police also contributed to the family‘s distress. The Horák family was allowed to return to their house only in 1960. Zdeněk had to work in the local agricultural cooperative since he was fourteen years old, and the cooperative‘s leaders kept preventing him from continuing with his studies. Thanks to his ability and persistence, he eventually managed not only to complete a long-distance study of secondary school, but also to earn a degree from an agricultural college in 1987. After the fall of the communist regime, he purchased tens of hectares in the privatization process and today he is one of the most successful farmers in the region.