Vladimír Koudelka

* 1931

  • "They pressured us in such a way that they financially ruined us slowly. We just paid the debt in the fifty-fifth year, at the end of the year. We wiped all that out, but we were already penniless, so to speak. And then all of a sudden we were under so much pressure. And they were withholding money from us. If he didn't deliver, if he didn't meet supplies, the money that were going through the bank, they withheld it from us. And then they came to set up a cooperative farm, they calculated the non-deliveries in free prices - they were double prices. There were so-called contingent prices and free prices. And there was a big difference, for example, in the case of pork - a 100 kilos of pig cost, they paid the contingent price of 600 crowns, and the free price of 1,600 crowns. So at those free prices, we would have had to pay for the missed supplies. And they were quite high... They were just pushing us with those obligatory supplies because they kept giving us higher and higher so we couldn't meet it. And they calculated there 60,000 crowns for us to pay for those non-deliveries. Well, they all gave up after that."

  • "And he still came to our place, it was the end of August, to our place on a Sunday. Just a short holiday. But he didn't say anything, there was no mention of it. And at the beginning of September, suddenly the secret ones, these State Security guys appeared here. They came in the evening, we were cleaning the cattle. And where we had - they asked my parents where their son was. My parents didn't know anything. Well, then, of course, we were here in the morning, maybe we were getting up, they were already here. And so we already knew something was going on. So my mother went to Prague. She drove there, stayed with friends, and in the morning she went to Milovice. She wanted to find out about it too. And they didn't... so she had someone called to the gate, an officer. But the officer came and he didn't talk to her at all. But the guys at the gate said, 'Mother, don't worry, he's already gone over the hills.' So she came home. Well, she was so... we were scared. We didn't know what had happened to him."

  • "Then there were several... There is a gamekeeper´s lodge here, it's called Na Zdrůbku, there was a gamekeeper there, he was shot by the Russians. I don't know why, for what reason. There's a mill here near Níkovice. The miller was shot again. He had... The Russians were camping nearby and at night they got drunk and went there. There was a servant girl in the mill. They somehow got to know about it, so they went there. And the miller defended her there and they shot him."

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    Zhoř u Milevska, 09.06.2024

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    duration: 01:46:58
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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I couldn’t just run off and leave my parents behind

Vladimír Koudelka, 1960s
Vladimír Koudelka, 1960s
photo: Witness´s archive

Vladimír Koudelka was born on 16 October 1931 in a family of small farmers in the village of Květuš in the northern part of South Bohemia. In 1947, the family sold their house and moved to nearby Zhoř, where they expanded the original four hectares of fields to 14 hectares of farmland. However, they later lost it, as well as machinery and farm equipment, as a result of collectivisation. In the 1950s, they were unable to meet the unrealistically increased compulsory supplies, and were forced to join the local cooperative farm (JZD) in 1956. In 1952, the witness´s brother Jan deserted during basic military service and managed to cross the state border into Germany near Železná Ruda. Jan did not meet his family again until 1969, when they were able to visit him in Heidelberg, Germany. Vladimír Koudelka married for the first time in 1956 to Marie Hejnová, with whom he had two children. He married a second time in 1976 to Libuše Smetanová. He worked all his life in agriculture. In 2024, he and his wife Libuše were living in their house in Zhoř near Milevsko.