Everybody said: When Tácha signs, we‘ll sign
Stáhnout obrázek
Jindřich Tomášek was born on 28 May 1944 as the youngest of four children of Jan and Marie Tomášek in Hluboká u Borovan. After the communist coup in February 1948, the Tomášek family, with their 22 ha of fields and 4.5 ha of forest, became kulaks and were severely affected by the collectivisation of agriculture. His father, Jan Tomášek, refused to join the emerging unified agricultural cooperative (JZD). The situation was all the worse because, as the biggest landowner in the village, he was the local authority for many. Many smaller farmers were waiting for him to join the JZD. The family was twice threatened with eviction from the village. Jan Tomášek was the last one from the village to join the JZD in 1957, at a time when the family was threatened with eviction for the second time and the situation was already unbearable for everyone. Communist persecution affected all the family members. The older siblings were not allowed to study. After elementary school, they had to join the JZD in Hluboká or work in production. Jindřich Tomášek was allowed to study at the secondary agricultural school only after two years of work in the JZD. After his military service, he sued the JZD, which did not want to release him from the cooperative. He won the lawsuit, but he could not find a job; everyone in the district was afraid to employ him. He found a job only with the soldiers in České Budějovice, where he started working as an auxiliary worker. Later, with a stamp of approval from the soldiers, he was employed at the Calofrig company in Borovany, where he worked from the 1970s until his retirement in 2008. He never joined the Communist Party. Because of his kulak origin, his children still had problems getting into studies in the 1980s. At the time of filming (2025), he lived with his wife Ludmila in Hluboká u Borovan.
