Miroslav Liška

* 1949

  • “Dad said an interesting thing. He never smoked, and there while keeping watch he smoked ten English cigarettes. They’d get packages with chocolate and cigarettes, and he liked the smell so much that he smoked them. Otherwise, as a blacksmith, he made the officers pips out of a tin, as they’d gone rusty. After boot camp they moved on to Dukla Pass. He said that things were really rough before Dukla Pass. When they approached, the Germans gave them all they had, shells exploded all over the place, a horse fell with its guts splayed out. He said they were sent up a hill with a German embankment on the edge of the forest. Dad just heard the Russian order that they mustn’t retreat. Dad had a light machine-gun and his assistant gunner Votava carried his bullets. He said he shot and shot until he got within reach of the forest. He ran out of bullets, so he turned round in search of Votava and copped a shrapnel into the back of his head.”

  • “Dad joined the co-op. It was bad there. According to what he said, during the threshing season they expected him to work morning, afternoon and night shift. So he began sabotaging it, and he left, or he had himself removed two years later, and he farmed for himself. Unfortunately, they gave him a replacement field all the way at what they called Kamchatka, where there’s a broadcast relay station. The top of the hill is 547 metres high, and they gave him a field at its base. You couldn’t plant potatoes behind the hill because the boars dug them out, the only possibility was corn. He grew potatoes in front of the hill. The soil was stony, the harvest was poor. And the quotas were high. He had to hand in three times the rate compared to the cooperative. So when we didn’t fulfil it, they even forbade us from slaughtering our own pig. No one cared that there were six children there.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    byt pamětníka - Libina, 23.03.2016

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    délka: 
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu The Stories of Our Neigbours
  • 2

    Libina, 01.08.2016

    (audio)
    délka: 02:20:38
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
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The last kulak

Miroslav Liška
Miroslav Liška
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Miroslav Liška was born on 3 November 1949 in Horní Libina as the fourth of six children of Jan and Alexandra Liška. His parents came from Podlísky, Volhynia; they remigrated to Czechoslovakia in 1947. They settled down in Horní Lbina, where they tended to 8.9 hectares (22 acres) of their own farmland. However, a united agricultural cooperative was founded in the village in 1950. Influenced by his experience with the founding of kolkhozes in the Soviet Union, his father also joined the cooperative. He left and returned to private farming after two years. He had to deliver farming produce quotas that were triple the rate per acre compared to the local cooperative. Even so, he resisted this pressure until 1974, when he took up a disability pension due to war wounds that he suffered while fighting for Dukla Pass. His father‘s conflict with the Communist regime influenced Miroslav‘s childhood. Compared to his peers, he had to spend all of his free time working on the farm, and he had difficulties getting accepted to any field of study outside of agriculture. In the end he trained as a bricklayer and worked at OSP Šumperk (District Construction Enterprise Šumperk) for many years. After the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the district construction enterprise, he took to business for a few years. He led a group of labourers - they did digging work for telecommunication lines and later also construction work. He has been retired on a disability pension since 2003. Miroslav Liška still lives at the family farm in Libina.