"But I experienced a different kind of pressure just two weeks in. It might sound ridiculous, but I'll tell you. In the ninth-grade reader, there was a speech by Gottwald, and right after that came a poem by Stanislav Kostka Neumann. It began: ‘Be proud,’ which I nearly skipped, then there was the poem A Plate of Mushrooms from the collection The Book of Forests, Waters, and Hills. If I remember it right, it went: ‘Yellow, that’s a chanterelle, like a dandelion smiling, like a housewife singing because the harvest was bountiful.’ And then the metaphor: ‘Gold from the fields poured into the barns, seven fat cows lowed.’ Well, the kids liked it. But then they asked me, ‘Sir, why are there cows in the poem?’ And I said, ‘Kids, that symbolizes abundance.’ – ‘How do you know?’ I said, ‘Well, that’s the story of Joseph in Egypt.’ And I added that it’s from the Bible. ‘Will you tell us the story?’ So I told it to them. I think they liked it. But that evening, someone must’ve mentioned it at home… There was a party meeting, and my name came up. The next morning, Ziegelbaure came into my Czech class. I was doing some eleven-clause sentences with the kids. He didn’t last long—left after fifteen minutes. Later, he came to my office and said, ‘Don’t you think that was a bit too hard for them, what you were doing?’ And I, being a cheeky young guy, said, ‘Well, life isn’t going to coddle them either.’ And he shot back: ‘Just so you know why I came to your class—you’re teaching religion during your lessons. One more time and you're done teaching!’ I’d only been teaching for two weeks… and that happened."
"I liked going to school for several reasons - it was warm, I didn't have to work. The headmaster made music there, sang beautifully, painted beautifully. It was fine and I was strangely good at school. Now we are in the family... my father's uncle was a doctor of theology, that is, no fool, and somehow those genes just got passed on. When I was a sophomore, we were first graders, third graders in one classroom, second graders, fourth graders, fifth graders in another classroom, a classroom to be exact. Well, maybe I enjoyed history. And when the fifth grader couldn't do it, they already had history, and he couldn't recite it, so the sophomore signed up, I recited it, and the teacher was mad at the fifth grader. And then they were mad at me that if I rather have kept quiet... It wasn't easy, but I really liked school."
"And we experienced that terrible pressure — it came in several waves. One was that they imposed almost impossible production quotas. And if you failed to meet them, you were labeled a saboteur — which meant you could be prosecuted, imprisoned, and stripped of your property. That was one level. Then they would come and agitate. They told you nonsense you couldn’t possibly believe. And if they couldn’t pressure you any other way — like they did with my father — things started happening: our dog disappeared, the chickens were stolen within two weeks, and within a month, we hadn’t fulfilled our egg quota. Then my father was summoned to the local council, where the chairman of the National Committee shouted at him that he was sabotaging socialist agriculture and supply chains. And I’ll tell you something awful — after they evicted a farmer named Bobr, my mother commented on it, and she ended up in court and got a suspended sentence. The chairman of the National Committee then said to my father, ‘Well, if you don’t deliver, we’ll have no problem handing it over to the prosecutor. They’ll lock you up, lock up your wife, and the kids will go to state orphanages.’ And I think my dad took it seriously — he talked to our relatives, and we as children already knew exactly which relatives we would go to if things went bad."
"Well, then I went back to the apprenticeship after the election and we had an old deputy there, he was coming off his third heart attack and he was grooming me to take over from him. But he didn't tell me. He didn't. And he's always, 'I'm so sick, look, come do this,' and he told me how, yeah. And when I knew how to do it, he pushed my application to the Communist Party. That was... Gentlemen, that was September 1989. He shoved a Communist Party application form in my hand and he says, 'Fill this out and we'll tell you and you give it to us and we'll make you a representative.' And I knew that, guys, that was trouble. Me and the Communist Party... From a family where there was a Catholic priest - and the Communist Party. Well... After what they did to my dad, it just wasn't possible. And I knew if I said no, it was gonna be trouble. Because the school principal was a Slovak, like Babiš, then he was a member of the ideological committee of the Communist Party, and now I'll say the third word, sueable, what a bastard. nd I knew that if I said no, I’d pay for it. So I kept putting it off. Then one day I was alone, I collapsed on the bed in the bedroom, and in that instant, guys, an incredible thought came to me. ‘Uncle,’ — that was the priest — ‘Uncle, I just can’t do that to you.’
So when they came, I said no. And then all hell broke loose. They started coming to my classes two at a time for inspections, trying to prove I had no business being a teacher, that I was incompetent. Two weeks later came November. The Communists fell — and I was left in peace."
"We took the Sanssouci express here from Budějovice, we reached the border in Velenice, in the meantime they had time to search us... And now we cross the border, they switched on our locomotive, connected the Austrian one, and an Austrian railwayman entered. Guys, culture shock. He was in a light uniform, clean, ironed, clean shirt, tie. Our railwaymen, to put it in Czech, they were in dark blue uniforms, bulging knees, greasy... Can you imagine the shock? He sticks his head in and says: 'Alles Tschechoslowaken? Alles. Auf Wiedersehen.' And the inspection was over. Like this, for example. And then, we got to Vienna and, you guys, you have no idea, the second culture shock was that we saw the shop windows and there was merchandise in the shop windows. Except having those shillings... That wasn't here. There were posters or political decorations in the windows. There wasn't. And suddenly there it was."
"When the JZDs were established, in our country it was in 1957, they tried... Because who could from the countryside... Because after the JZDs were established there was crazy poverty in the countryside. Have you ever heard the term work unit? That was the work you did in a day, and you got money for it. But the work unit in the beginning of the cooperatives was like six crowns, seven crowns. That was terribly low. And now in the JZD they didn't pay you monthly like they do today. The way it went was that they gave you an advance, it was fifty percent, so you got three times 50 crowns a day, and the rest they gave you as a cash on delivery, and maybe not. Because when the co-operative was building, for example, they didn't get a building loan from the state, they had to build with their own money, and that was deducted from the profit, and what was left was only budgeted for the unit. So, excuse me, I'm going to say this in an ugly way, but I know the situation in Bohunice, for example, where it was so miserable that if the farmers hadn't had allotments, and if they hadn't also stolen from time to time to feed their cows on those allotments, they would literally have had to die. So it was miserable."
Jan Bartuška was born on February 2, 1948 in České Budějovice and comes from a religious family. He grew up in the village of Březí, which was demolished in the early 1990s for the construction of the Temelín Nuclear Power Plant. His parents worked as farmers on a private farm of seven hectares and Jan, together with his five siblings, was used to helping with the work in the fields from a young age. Collectivisation hit his family in the 1950s. Although he had always been an excellent student, the communist regime made it difficult for him to get into high school and university. Thanks to his determination and the help of other people, he eventually successfully completed both levels of education. After graduating from the Faculty of Education at Charles University, he started teaching Czech and history at a primary school, but he was only allowed to teach in the border region, in Šumava, where he eventually stayed for eighteen years. Later, he was even allowed to take up doctoral studies. As an excellent student and later as a teacher, he was tempted to join the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but he always refused. After the Velvet Revolution he briefly held the post of deputy mayor of Český Krumlov and then served as deputy headmaster at the Bishop‘s Grammar School. In 2018, he taught at an elementary school in České Budějovice, although he had been retired for several years. In 2021, Jan Bartuška was living in České Budějovice.
