František Novák

* 1934

  • "When they evicted Mayor Závodský, they divided his cattle among those who did not enter JZD [the Unified Agricultural Cooperative - transl.], half the village didn't join JZD, half the village joined it. And everyone had to take some cattle. We didn't take any because we had nowhere to keep it. They needed to get rid of it, so that they could build a cowshed there immediately. So they needed to get rid of it, and where could they put the cattle - they couldn't kill it, it wasn't old enough for slaughter. So they divided it up, and everybody had to buy it. And we didn't go there because we had nowhere to keep it, we had a barn full of animals. They scheduled nine head of cattle for us, and we had nowhere to put it. We had four cows, and then we had about five little ones. So it was complicated because we had to split it up like that. Everybody took the cattle from Závodský, and we left it there. And the secretary, the boy, came and said that we still had our cattle there and that we would pay 50 crowns a day for housing and feeding. And I said to him, 'You bastard, we don't have any cattle, we won't take any cattle, and we won't pay anything.' I grabbed him by the collar and pushed him out the door. And it goes downhill like that into the yard, and he couldn't keep up as I ran after him. He was putting his hand in his pocket, and I was yelling at him to get the gun out, that I would shoot him with it right then. And I ran at him. And he slammed the front door and ran away screaming that he wouldclamp down on me."

  • "I remember we had smuggled grain, it was being milled at night, we used to go to the mill. And we brought fresh flour, we had two sacks of it. And the inspection was about to come. He had nowhere to put it, so my dad–to make it as quick as possible–put it between the cows under the trough. There were two and two cows standing side by side, and there were big stone troughs. There was no room anywhere else. So my father didn't know where to put it, so he put it under the cows, under the trough. He put straw in there to cover it. But before the inspection came [...] I, as a curious boy, went with them. One was tall wearing a uniform, and two were in plain clothes. And he walked across the barn and then to the back of the barn, he walked across it, and there was the flour hidden between the last cows. But the cows had pulled the straw away, and the flour sacks were shining white. We used to put the flour in canvas sacks. Of course, we made canvas at home and sew sacks out of it. And as the cows smelled the flour, it was a treat to them, they pulled the straw away and licked the flour. So he went amongst the cows, and I remember to this day the word, 'So gut.' He turned and walked away. The two men didn't follow him. So he walked away, and my dad was all sweaty. He said, 'I could see I was going to get locked up.' But everything turned out all right."

  • "At work, they scolded me for provocatively going behind the voting screen. No one went behind the screen. The communists went out to vote demonstratively. Of course, I went behind the screen but there was no pencil. So I went back and said, 'How come there's no pencil?' So they gave me a pencil, and I went back there and ticked off what I needed to and put it back. So they knew I didn't vote for them, and I even asked for the pencil provocatively. They reported it to the factory. They gave me a little lecture there for a while, but I survived. They didn't do anything to me, they couldn't do anything to me. I worked in the slaughterhouse - it was hard work. There was nothing worse they could do to me than that I had to work."

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    Telč, 28.07.2022

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Dad threw the red book of the JZD agitators on the floor

František Novák, circa 2000
František Novák, circa 2000
zdroj: Witness archive

František Novák was born on 21 January 1934 in Brandlín, South Bohemia. Both of his parents came from farming families and owned small farms. During World War II, they had to hand over their food supplies. Like other farmers, they tried to keep at least something for themselves. For example, they used to secretly grind grain but they had to look out for ubiquitous German controls. In 1944, they observed how one of the planes from the Union, which was flying over Brandlín to bomb Pardubice, dropped several bombs by accident. At the end of the war, German refugees and members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army appeared in the area and robbed potatoes from their cellar at night. Later came the German captives who had to work for the farmers. The witness‘s father joined the Communist Party in 1946 out of enthusiasm. When they started repressing farmers and agitating them for joining the Unified Agricultural Cooperative, he threw the Communist Party card on the floor. In addition, he refused to join the JZD [the Unified Agricultural Cooperative - transl.]. In return, they took his fields from him, and he was allotted distant fields and fields with stony soil instead. In addition, they admeasured him a huge supply of food. The witness apprenticed as a butcher and worked in the Satrapa butcher factory all his life. He never in his life voted for Communists and never joined the Communist Party. He was a deeply religious evangelical and attended church every Sunday. In 1968, he joined the demonstration against the August occupation. He listened to Radio Free Europe, where he got information about politics, dissent or Charter 77. During the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he participated in all the demonstrations in the area. In the new era, he regained the family lands in restitution and continued to farm privately. In 2022, he lived in his house in Brandlín.