“Well, they called us there. They organised the first big meeting, and there was a demonstration, a protest it was, a kind of camp of the people. It was bad, but in the end people said, oh well, we only had a small bit of land anyway, so it wasn’t worth moping about. The people with larger estates had them confiscated. The yeomen and the rich farmers, they were all forced. So some joined the co-op [the agricultural cooperative - trans.], some found employment, and some switched to industry; if you could find a place, you took it. People were annoyed and no one even wanted to speak. Nothing, it was terribly depressing, because from having everything to suddenly having nothing... I wasn’t so devastated because we had fields of the sort the co-op couldn’t take. They couldn’t cultivate them, they were on the vinyard hill. So they let us keep that, but as a croft. If you didn’t have a field like that, you had to give it up, and they ordered and assigned you a croft. It was all so frustrating. Worse than under Hitler. The spiritual situation, as they confiscated everything. The things people loved. They took all the fields, they took their horses, they led the cattle into the cow farm. We had one cow, so they took her from us. She had just birthed four calves, they were young and fine. Then one time I was walking out behind the fields, and they were taking the cows away again. The ones that didn’t suit them, they took them to the slaughter, and as I went along I suddenly caught sight of our cow. I called out to her. I said: ‘Mary!’ And she bellowed, she’d recognised my voice. I told her they were taking her to the slaughter. I was so terribly sorry for her. I loved her dearly. I’d always take her into my arms and stroke her like this. Oh, we had our own milk, I had nothing to worry about.”
“We had rehearsed Nation under the Cross. It was anti-Hitler, such a nice play. And they, because it was under the cross, so they thought it was the Christian cross. And we had it all rehearsed and the performance, the date announced. And we were all set on the stage to start playing. The hall was packed, and that Figura Vašek comes up and says: ‘Michal, you’re not allowed to perform the play.’ And Michal says: ‘Why, we had permission from the district until now.’ ‘It’s against the state.’ ‘But it’s a national thing.’ He knew nothing about it. And Michal says: ‘You come out here in front of the curtain and tell those people you’re forbidding it.’ So he backed off. ‘Oh, go and play it then, but no repeats.’ Well, after we did Tvrdonice with Michal and Pavel Čech, we did a lovely harvest feast. And they came at us, saying we put religious songs in it. Well, we weren’t even allowed to put ‘God, bless us, give us all things good, protect our vinyards from harm.’ Well, what’s so religious about that? But Pavel said: ‘Růži, don’t argue with them.’ He followed me outside. ‘Promise you’ll amend it, and then you can do it the way you prepared it.’ And that was a huge success, the harvest feast. And then Chairman Řehánek - I had been on very good terms with him as a girl - oh, he was a Communist, but he was, we would say, human. And he rooted for the folk movement a lot, and when we did the harvest feast, he said: ‘Růži, would you come over to the kitty, for a little refreshment.’ So we walked along, and suddenly this one Tvrdonite started at Řehánek: ‘Geez, Christ, the harvest feast was so religious. It was prepared by a sexton or what.’ And Řehánek said: ‘You shut your gob, he’s good at stuff, and you’re good at nothing.’”
“We witnessed the battlefront. We had a shed, have a shed at the foot of Čaganov [Hill], and a cellar. And now they, the people from our place, they didn’t have sheds. Those were all cottage people at our end, and grannies and widows. And so Michal told them all: ‘You’ll all go into our cellar.’ So there were about thirty-five of us there. The gaffer set up benches there, bricks, and everyone sat, and we waited it through. At first we peeped out and looked as the Russians advanced from Lužice. We had a beautiful view because it was on the hill, Lužice was, and they went down the hill to Bojanovice. There’s a kind of basin between Lapoštorf Forest and the sheds, and that’s the route they took. They kept coming, hordes of them... They kept coming from Lapoštorf to the village, on and on in two and threes. Well, there were lots of them Russians. And planes flew overhead. And the Germans, we could see the Germans packing. They packed everything up and retreated. They just zoomed by our shed with their carts. And right behined them, the distance was less than three kilometres, were the Russians. And they kept at it, the Germans, kept pulling back, but those others kept chasing them, kept shooting - well, war. It lasted only... it started in the afternoon, but at three o’clock when they arrived here from Lanžhot. A Russian soldier came straight to our shed and asked who was there. I said: ‘Don’t worry, we’re all locals here, there are thirty-five of us, come and have a look. There’s no foreigner here.’ He understood me well. So he entered the cellar immediately, looked over all of us and saw that we were all grannies and aunties in folk dress. So he ran back out again, and the gaffer already had a cup ready for him, so he drank it down and told me we were heading off to Klobouky.”
Růžena Komosná, née Svobodová, was born on 21 October 1920 in Dolní Bojanovice as the youngest of four children. She spent her whole life in the house of her birth. In 1931 she recorded a song for President T. G. Masaryk. From her childhood she was a member of Orel (Eagle, the nationwide Catholic sports organisation), she acted in plays and sang. She attended elementary and town (upper primary) school. During the war she made money on the side by sewing, which she had learnt from her mother and sister. In 1943 she married Michal Komosný, and in January 1945 she gave birth to their son Josef. In April 1945 she witnessed the front pass through their village and she met Russian soldiers. After the war she and her husband began sewing freelance. In 1948 she threw an empty ticket into the ballot during the elections as an expression of protest against Communism. The regime dissolved their business, and in 1950 she had to sign membership of the local agricultural cooperative, where she worked for fifteen years. She and her husband sewed folk costumes, and from 1963 they were members of the Centre for Folk Art Production. They led an amateur theatre group, and when that was banned by the Communists, they went on to prepare ethnographic programmes for the festival in Tvrdonice.
