Jaroslav Kunstfeld

“The Germans blew up the railway bridge over the Morava the day before our liberation. When the front passed by, the Russian soldiers started building a new bridge. I was seventeen years old, and I drove horses. We hauled rocks out of the Morava, poured concrete, and all able men had to go work there. I remember that one Russian soldier fell down there and died. Then there was a bloated German soldier who came floating down the Morava face down. We dragged him out and buried him.”

“We had a super-Communist living in the life tenancy [a specific Czech legal and cultural institution, in which a small independent flat is kept in an outlying part of the farmhouse for the elderly parents to retire to when they pass the farm on to their children or another farmer - trans.], he was a butcher. We shared a door. I tried to work out how I’d secretly kill the pig. I made a kind of pair of electric pliers from the slats of a bundling machine, and in the night we sealed up the door to the pigsty, and I killed it with the pliers. Dad was afraid and didn’t come out at all, so I killed it and gutted it myself. The Communist Pur, whose dead now, lived with his wife in the life tenancy. When I came back from military service, and because I’d worked in construction, I wanted to fix up a place for myself. We didn’t have anywhere to live, and the life tenancy was mine. So I applied at the village [committee], saying that I’d married and that I want to repair it and live there. The chairman Antonín Machálek told me that Communists took precedence. So I wasn’t allowed to live in my own place. Then I went to the butcher, and he told me to wall up one of the doors, that I could live in one of the rooms. There were three rooms in all.”

“I was drafted into the Third Aviation Battalion in Valašské Meziříčí. The very next day we went to Plavecké Podhradie, north of Bratislava, which was our boot camp. I spent two months there. Everything went on normally, the Communists didn’t filter us. The political officer always called me in to have a chat. He never said anything to the effect that he was finding something out about me. I didn’t notice it. He behaved in a friendly manner, we were on first-name terms. One time he came up and told me he hadn’t thought I was such a bitch. I asked him why, and he said he’d let me read the assessment sent by the Communists from my village. It stood there that I was raised in a clerical way, that I was a kulak and an undesirable. As soon as he gave it to me to read, the very next day he sent me with my gun and my things to Valašské Meziříčí, where I cleaned windows in the kitchen for three days. Then he sent me to the mine, and I was on my own again.”