Jana Pokludová

* 1944

  • “The farmstead could not do without us children. We just had to work. I remember that, in the 1960s, we had a small hayrack wagon. We used to mow the ditches along the road from Stará Ves nad Ondřejnicí, dry the hay and then take the wagon back home by gravity. Hard work. You went to the fields in the morning and harvested crops. Father worked the scythe, mother formed the sheaves, and brother and me made overlaps so we could tie the sheaves. Then the parents went back home to feed the animals and we had to stook the sheaves. Brother and I were always busy. We didn’t go for holidays in the summer – we had a meadow by the forest, so it was not ‘mow it and leave for the seaside’: we grabbed rakes and went raking up the hay.”

  • “When grandad died, they drove the coffin in a fire engine. The engine was red. Before the engine arrived, my father and one more gentleman went to Prague to get the engine that had been assigned to them. It was just a chassis really, and it was in the winter. They came back from Prague with a new fire engine in December and fitted a new body to it. Eventually, they drove my grandad in his coffin to the graveyard in the fire engine. It was moving. They stopped at the crossroads where you turn towards Stará Ves nad Ondřejnicí and to the town, and our musicians played him a song. The last two apprentices, Václav and Pavel, were in the shop and just pounded the anvil. The song the musicians played was like this: ‘He hammered the steel merrily, but the sledgehammer will not ring anymore.’”

  • “The horses were tied up in front of the shop, and dad had this special tripod stool on which the horse’s leg was rested and then he filed down the hoof. At first, he had to trim, then file, then scrape the hoof. And then the horseshoe that fit the hoof had to be heated in the furnace. The furnace burned coke only. The farrier type of coke was hard to get in the 1950s, so it had to be used sparingly. Then he hammered the horseshoes on – it was all done outdoors. That’s the way it went.”

  • Celé nahrávky
  • 1

    Ostrava, 17.02.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:52:04
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
  • 2

    Ostrava, 08.03.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:17:47
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

The communist regime took dad’s smithery away. The daughter was not allowed to study.

Witness with dad in his blacksmith shop circa 1956
Witness with dad in his blacksmith shop circa 1956
zdroj: Archiv pamětnice

Jana Pokludová, née Šoltysová, was born in Brušperk on 13 April 1944 into blacksmith Rudolf Šoltys’ family. The family lived in a modest house with four rooms, one of which was used as the workshop. The blacksmith business ran in the family for three generations; the witness used to help her dad as a little girl and she can still remember the correct procedure of horseshoeing a horse. As the family was strongly religious, the communist officials did not allow Jana to study at a telecommunications school. She was offered three different options. She chose a bakery vocational school, following which she also completed a school-leaving exam at a technical school in Pardubice. Thanks to that, she was able to work in a laboratory at Severomoravské pekárny a cukrárny (North Moravian Bakeries) in Martinov and then in Sviadnov. She was dismissed after the Velvet Revolution, but she found a job at the shipping department of the bakery in Cihelní Street in Ostrava. The witness retired after that. At the time of the recording in 2022, the witness was living as a widow in Brušperk.