František Holub

* 1933

  • “It was exerted on everyone, especially the smaller farmers. The bigger ones weren’t too eager to join in. They called a meeting and quarrelled. It took a lot of takes to form it. Then they finally managed to establish it. A few tiny farmers got together in a cooperative. The pressure continued. Then everyone was in it, even my parents. The pressured for it to happen. The smaller ones said they wouldn’t join the cooperative unless the bigger ones go as well. Then the whole village was in it. But that was just for a short time. Then they locked my dad up, and my uncle too. He had fifteen hectares. And then one more, who had ten hectares, they sent him off to the AEC at forty years of age.”

  • “On Monday we received an injunction stating that we were undesirable and that they’d evict us, and on Friday they came for us in two cars. We took what Mum managed to pack up. The neighbours helped her. [Granddad] was still living in the extension at the time, so we were two families. Two lorries arrived. We loaded up as much as we could. We took something from Granddad’s as well. They seated us into the car. Granddad was over seventy years old. The chairman of the village council was there together with a policeman, and they checked to see what we were taking with us. They put us into the car and took us to Hynčice. That was on about 23 July.”

  • “Before [we] joined the co-op, we were already behind on our shipments. To make us have more hectares, they wanted to allocate a municipal field to us. Of course, we refused that. Dad didn’t want it. It was some kind of scrubland [estimation of the Czech dialectal word ‘holajzny’ - trans.] who-knows-where... so they had it tilled by the MTS [acronym for ‘machine tractor station’ - trans.] on our expense, so that we’d have more to manage.”

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    Staré Město, 05.05.2015

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When we fulfilled the shipment quotas one year, they increased them so we couldn’t fulfil them next time, so they’d have grounds for locking us up

František Holub
František Holub
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

František Holub was born on 19 June 1933 in the family farm in Vitice, in what was then Český Brod District. His parents owned one of the largest farms in the village, with more than 20 hectares of farmland. During the rural collectivisation, on 31 March 1953 a people‘s tribunal in Český Brod convicted his father of sabotage in a show trial and sentenced him to four years of prison and the loss of all his property. In July 1953 they evicted the whole family two hundred kilometres away to the village of Hynčice pod Sušinou, on the eastern foothills of Králický Sněžník. A month later the witness‘s brother Václav was drafted into the army, and his family background caused him to be assigned to the Auxiliary Engineering Corps (AEC; de facto forced labour), where he was kept for an illegal period of 30 months. In October 1953 František also received summons to military service. The same scenario repeated itself, he was also assigned to the AEC. He spent 27 months in the black-coal May Day Mine in Karviné. All the family members were then forced to take employment at the state farm in Hynčice pod Sušinou. František Holub never moved back to Vitice, and he now lives in Staré Město with his wife Marie.