Josef Kotík

* 1945

  • “Some children who had some knowledge knew that us children did not come directly from the farm but that we lived a little further above them, so they treated us in the same way. There were children directly from the farm. There were the Boseks, the Zmidlochs, and the Mahvovs who lived above us. They more or less knew that all the people there had been evicted. Someone might have started to use the word kulak there. When somebody called me kulak, I was not even angry. It meant nothing to me. Then they told it to me here in Žďár when they told me I could not be admitted because I was the son of a farmer."

  • “Two small houses were built below the railway track. We moved there knowing there was no electricity and no water. The water – we had to take a cart or sledge in winter and two cans and go down to the farm for water. It was a problem in winter because the pump did not work and so we went down frozen stairs to a well that was three metres deep and frozen mice were there. It was disgusting and horrible. I can still remember… But what could you do? Nothing. There was no electricity and we lived there for three years.”

  • “A rumour saying that we would come back in half a year circulated, which was never true, it never happened. Our stuff was given to a room for the retired farmers and locked in assuming we would return, and it would stay there. Of course, it was not true. Because I went to the Nedomas on holidays, I was really surprised that the toys which were put in the room for the retired farmers were carried by children from Bohdalec. I recognized them. And another thing I have been sad about to this day is that there was a family library and nothing of it survived."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Žďár nad Sázavou, 29.06.2021

    (audio)
    délka: 01:51:01
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

Even though my dad joined the United Agricultural Cooperative, the communists evicted us anyway

Josef Kotík with his wife, the wedding photo
Josef Kotík with his wife, the wedding photo
zdroj: witness´s archive

Josef Kotík was born on 20 December 1945 in Bohdalec in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands. He grew up on a farm of his parents who owned around thirty hectares of farmland. His father Rudolf Kotík worked as a village librarian for some time, he had studied at an agricultural school and from 1942 he was in charge of a family farm that had a long tradition. The United Agricultural Cooperative was founded in Bohdalec in 1951 and Rudolf Kotík joined it because he did not manage to farm on his own. Even though he gave his property to the United Agricultural Cooperative, a smear campaign against him was mounted a year later. He was later expelled from the cooperative; the returned fields were exchanged for infertile ones and by gradual blackmail, he was driven to evict. The alleged reason for the dispute was a garden next to their house. The family was evicted to Poříčí near Přibyslav where they lived in unsuitable conditions without electricity and water. Rudolf and Ludmila worked as workers at a local state farm. They had to leave the place three years later when Ludmila got ill and could no longer work. They lived in Žďár nad Sázavou with Rudolf Kotík‘s sister for a similar length of time, she then had them evicted by court order. Josef Kotík could not study at secondary school because of his cadre report, and he apprenticed in the engineering company ŽĎAS, where he worked for a total of 48 years. His father Rudolf Kotík asked for rehabilitation in the second half of the 1960s, but it was denied at the time of starting normalization. He worked as a blue-collar worker and never returned to his home village. His mental state was affected by the eviction and also by the tragic death of his oldest son Miloslav. He died at eighty-six and unfortunately did not live to see the fall of the communist regime. The witness lived in Žďár nad Sázavou at the time of the recording (June 2021).