Zdeněk Urban

* 1927

  • “We did defend ourselves, obviously. We were managing the farm well, we’ve always met the required delivery quotas, so we did defend ourselves. I don’t remember when the cooperative was founded.” Interviewer: “Could you describe the pressure they were exerting on you to encourage you to join?” – “That was tough. They would always summon us to the local state committee. There was a ferocious chairman from Postřelmůvek, and two or three other comrades. The dumbest ones, who had been hiding all the time during the German occupation not daring to come out. But then they became heroes. They made it bad for us.”

  • “Most of the people understood the situation. There they were also liquidating them, and people later began to see through it, including the witnesses, because they were being forced to testify against us. And if you look at the statements I have here, most of them were adamant. But there was one Bolshevik, a bitch. She was working as a cleaner in the cowhouse. She returned from the interrogation. ´I stirred up trouble for those kulaks! They’ll go to Siberia now.´ But she didn’t even get home. She collapsed and remained lying there. Eyes popping out, mouth contorted, and turned up toes. She was just on her way to the cowhouse, eager to tell her coworkers how she made trouble for the kulaks. They won’t be back for a long time, she said. She was a dirty, lazy Bolshevik woman.”

  • “About the woman I mentioned – the one who collapsed in front of the cowhouse, with a contorted mouth and eyes popped out. There were more of them. More of them in such a small village. What kind of people are these?! On the date we were to make the required deliveries, she was crawling through our house and looking under the bed, in case we had the produce hidden there. There were people like this. You couldn’t make it. It was impossible to meet the quotas; they were raising them all the time. Requiring a delivery of 6000 kilograms of grain from ten hectares – here in the mountains. One was not able to meet this. The same with meat, milk. It was done on purpose to make us join the kolkhoz.”

  • “I got four years of imprisonment, Navrátil got six years, Janků seven years, Kvapil seven years and Bartoš one year.” Interviewer: “Did you expect the penalty to be so high?” - “We had been prepared for it. They had been training us and preparing us, we had to memorize our answers and we had been rehearsing it. We already did have some idea.”

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    Vyšehoří, 16.11.2010

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They turned five of the larger farmers from the village into an anti-state group

Zdeněk Urban-1948
Zdeněk Urban-1948
zdroj: archiv pamětníka

  Zdeněk Urban was born in 1927 in a small village of Vyšehoří in northern Moravia. In 1948 he inherited a farm from his parents with 10 hectares of land and for several years he earned his living as an independent farmer. In 1957, a unified agricultural cooperative was founded in the village. Under pressure, Zdeněk Urban joined the cooperative and was elected its chairman. He served in this position for only two years and then resigned of his own accord. In October 1960 he was arrested together with the other four largest farmers from the village. In a fabricated trial he was sentenced to four years of imprisonment, loss of all property and civil rights. He was sent to the uranium ore mines in Příbram-Bytíz. In May 1962 he was released in amnesty and began working in the agricultural cooperative again. Later he passed a school-exit exam and became an agronomist. His farm was returned to him in 1991. At present he is still living in his native village.