Milan Hlobílek

* 1932

  • “It was in the decisive year 1948 when the communists got to power. I remember that we were threshing grain and there was a member of the communist party who was standing there and counting the bags. He was quite dumb because he still could not get the correct number. So that was my experience with fervent communists who were so dumb but who had power and they fiercely applied it. When they got to power, before the election, they separated all the eighty hectares of lands which we owned. Father requested some land, and so they left a couple of hectares to him and he farmed there for one year in order to provide a living for us. The other land was worked on by other farmers. Obviously, a year later they confiscated the land from all of them and that was the end.”

  • “I received a letter from my father, telling me not to go home because they would move us, but he wrote that he did not know yet where and when. About two weeks later I received another letter in which he wrote me where they had evicted them and where I was to come. I arrived from school to the Haluzice stop and my father was waiting for me there. We walked over the hill towards the house. It was in early spring and we started in late afternoon. We came to Jestřabice and father said that the distance to the house was now the same as what we had already covered. We continued walking and it was getting dark and we were almost in the forest. I asked where we lived and father said that we lived there. I asked why there was no light on, and father replied that it was because there was no electricity, only kerosene lamps. The room was about two steps under the terrain and it had a dirt floor and two small windows, a stove in the left corner and one three-part closet, a table and two chairs and two beds and a bench. I asked where I would sleep and why they had not brought my bed. As father was loading my bed onto the truck when they were being evicted, the official told him that he should not take the bed because they would take care of me. I thus slept on the bench and then I constructed a bed and filled it with straw. It was desperate.”

  • “The Germans left the farm at the end of the war and everything was looted. They took the tractors away, I don’t know where, they killed the livestock and they stole whatever they could. Then the war front stopped in the village for two weeks and somebody took the rest during that time. They simply stole everything. We lived opposite the church, and the front was passing from the direction of Milotice, and Germans made a machine gun nest at the church tower and Russians were shooting at it. Before they could take an aim, they broke all our apartments and they broke all the windows. We came back after the war and we repaired everything. It was a lot of work.”

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    Zlaté Hory, 15.06.2017

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Who shall return to them what the communists had taken from them?

Milan Hlobílek in PTP
Milan Hlobílek in PTP
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

Milan Hlobílek was born December 29, 1932 in the village Mistřín (part of present-day Svatobořice). His father with Milan‘s uncle owned one of the largest farms in the Kyjov region there, with 84 hectares of arable land. Since they were former Czechoslovak legionnaires, the Nazi regime confiscated their farm in 1941 and the family was later evicted. In 1949, in turn, the farm became nationalized by the communist regime. Both families were then evicted to a remote hamlet Dvorek in the village Jestřabice in 1951. Together with other children of so-called kulaks, Milan was expelled from the agricultural school. They were then sent as so-called green barons to work at the state farm in a remote village Studnice in the Osoblaha region. Later when he began his military service, Milan Hlobílek was assigned to serve in the Auxiliary Technical Battalions (PTP) where young men served as cheap labour instead of undergoing army training and due to the colour of their epaulettes they were nicknamed black barons. However, even after the fall of the communist regime, Milan did not receive full compensation for the wrongdoings. Their farm and lands which had been completely devastated by that time were not eligible for restitution claims. In 2016, the remains of Milan‘s native farm were torn down and at present there is a petrol station, a car repair shop and a building of the Volunteer Firemen Corps in their place and the family‘s former fields are now owned by the state. In 2017 Milan Hlobílek lives in an apartment in the prefabricated building block in Zlaté Hory.