Josef Vaněk

* 1934

  • "A half of Polom was already taken by the Russians. A bomb hit our house. My father and a neighbour found a wounded Russian soldier on the road next to our house. They picked him up and carried him to the inn for treatment. An explosion shattered the inn windows and a shard of glass hit my father's eye. He lost the eye later on."

  • "They were already putting farmers under pressure by demanding huge contributions that we couldn't meet; it was far worse than under the Germans. They required grain, eggs, butter and everything, and it was just impossible to deliver. Then they started taking land away from those who didn't comply, fining and threatening them. My uncle told my mother to have me quit working on our land, otherwise we could run into debt, and advised her to have me work in Vítkovice instead. I still worked on the farm after my shifts for one more year. I would come home from Vítkovice after work and toil in the fields with my mother."

  • "When I was a little boy I went to Ostrava with my dad. That was during the German occupation. We rode a locomotive from Kyjovice to Svinov. My dad had to have a passport with my name written in it. We got off in Svinov and changed to a local train. There was a customs office on the Svinov bridge, and I recall the Hitler Youth were marching by, carrying the Nazi flag in the front. My dad was wearing a hat and he didn't take it off as a salute. One Hitler Youth member knocked it off his head and scolded him in German. That's exactly what I remember. The border between the Sudetenland and the Protectorate ran through Svinov. Ostrava belonged to the Protectorate."

  • "The landscape was completely different before. There were small groves and tall balks between fields with shrubs slowing the wind down. There were wet spots and marshes providing water reserve for long stretches of fields. Afterwards, though, it was all ploughed and levelled. When it gets windy, the wind blows dust up and down across the fields. They ruined everything."

  • "When the cooperative was formed, we had to surrender everything to it - the cows, the grain, the feed, and then the farmers had to work there. Farmers Juchelka, Žurek, and Byma carted the feed from the field, mowed using scythes back then. They had to do two or three rounds. One day, the hay got mowburnt and the women who were cleaning the sties fed the hay to the cows. It made the cattle sick. The men were arrested for sabotage. The jurors weren't farmers. They also arrested Vaněk for running a private sawmill. Even though they took it away from him, he would Vanek still going out there and supervise the work, so they arrested him for sabotage for that too. They were behind hte bars for two and a half years under the communists."

  • "The nuns taught us diverse preschool stuff. They played with us, we had to sleep there, and it was the same as today's preschools. But there weren't many of us kids there because not everyone could afford it. There were four nuns and several priests. It was across the street from the church, so it was just a short walk home for us."

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    Ostrava, 27.03.2019

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A bomb destroyed a part of their house at the end of the war. The father lost an eye

Josef Vaněk in Ostrava, March 2019
Josef Vaněk in Ostrava, March 2019
zdroj: Post Bellum

Josef Vaněk was born in Pustá Polom on 25 March 1934. His family owned a small farm. Both of his grandfathers worked at Count Friedrich Stolberg‘s castle in the nearby Kyjovice. Josef Vaněk witnessed war events as a child - the arrival of the Nazi troops in 1938 and the frontline passing through their village during the Ostrava-Opava Operation in the spring of 1945. After the war, his family repaired the damaged house and restored a disturbed field. In the wake of 1948, they faced ever-increasing pressure from authorities for compulsory crops and food levies. When a farming cooperative was established in Pustá Polom, they finally lost their land and livestock. Josef Vaněk had to work as a labourer in a sheet metal rolling mill in Ostrava-Vítkovice. He stayed in the steel industry until retirement. He was deeply saddened to watch the landscape near his native village transforming and the Czech farming industry declining both before and after 1989. He got married in 1956. He has two children and they lived in a detached house in Pustá Polom in 2019.