“Down in the mine, if you haven’t been there, if you spent your whole life outside and then, right, to be underground... When you went down the hole in the cage – and those were four-storey cages that took us down into the shaft – and you looked up and saw the hole at the top grow smaller and smaller until it disappeared. We worked at a depth of about a thousand metres, but that wasn’t important, you couldn’t practically tell what depth it was down below. We arrived at the bottom in the cage, got out, climbed into those coal carts in twos and drove for say three kilometres until we reached our workplace, right. And we worked on a wall there. Before we got to the face of the wall, they checked us up, of course, to see who could or couldn’t do what, and that’s how an extraction team was assembled. Simply said, the only purpose we were in the army for was toil.”
“When I completed my primary education, I wanted to carry on at the Upper Secondary School of Economics in Čáslav but was barred from doing so because of my origin. We wanted to circumvent the ban, me and one other from Štipoklasy, Věra Krulišová she was called. They had a pub and a farm there; so we did the exams to the economic school in Poděbrady. They kept us until 1 September. And on 1 September, when we enrolled at the school, having passed the exams, they called us into the headmaster’s office and just told us that we didn’t meet the practical requirements. And yet there were city boys there and girls. So they met the practical requirements, but we didn’t. And so they sent us home.”
“In 1950/51 they took our farm and evicted us. Dad was basically employed in the mines in Příbram and was banned from the Kutná Hora District. Mum had four children, us, to care for, she had no ration tickets, which were in use at the time. You couldn’t get anything without them. Dad was banned from any other work, and from a practical point of view, he was stuck in a mine in Příbram for several years. Then, when things loosened up a bit, he switched to the mine here in Kutná Hora, and it basically left him with such health problems that he died of silicosis.”
Bohuslav Procházka was born on 4 August 1938 in Přítoky near Kutná Hora. His parents had a big farm, which was nationalised in 1951. As a designated kulak, his father was sent to the mines in Příbram and was forbidden from all activities in Kutná Hora District. The witness‘s mother was left along with four children and no ration tickets. Bohuslav Procházka wanted to attend the Secondary School of Economics in Čáslav, but his application was denied for reasons of his family background. After training at a vocational school he was drafted into compulsory military service and sent to work in the mines in Ostrava. He returned home after two years. He married and found employment as an agronomist in Uhlířské Janovice. After the Velvet Revolution he and his family regained ownership of their farm through restitution.
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