Květa Pelantová

* 1927  †︎ unknown

  • "I also wanted to go to confession and communion, and there the priest told me that I could not, because I have an evangelical husband. That I can only if we had a Catholic wedding. I said, 'Look, we lived like this our whole lives. My mother-in-law was also a Catholic and my father-in-law was an evangelical, they lived together the same way. So, I will not do any wedding or marriage. I just won't go to that confession and to the communion. But I will always be catholic and dad will be evangelical.' And so, we stayed to the end."

  • "They offered it to the cooperative, they didn't leave it until they took over, they offered it to the cooperative, the fields. And then they offered them, sometime in January, to take it, that they would no longer farm, that they would be employees. And there was some agricultural tax that had to be paid. However, they did not farm at all, but they wanted the tax to be paid. And that was quite a lot of money. And we didn't have that much money at all, to pay for it. So, we had a debt. So, after that there was a house search at our place, they robbed there."

  • "During the war - what did it look like during the war? We had Germans from Bessarabia there, the Bessarabians were evicted there. And it was our family, who lived – the Pelants - in the farm that did not farm at the time and had the fields through land tenure and rented. And they, when the Bessarabians came here, they had nowhere to accommodate them, so they had to move out people all these farms which had not been farmed. And there they put the Bessarabites. And the Bessarabites farmed on the farms. That was the whole war."

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    Praha, 06.08.2019

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    duration: 01:29:13
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She married into a collectivized farm

Květa with her daughter also Květa, 1953
Květa with her daughter also Květa, 1953
photo: archive of the witness

She was born on November 17, 1927 in Mělnické Vtelno near Mělník. In 1950, she married Čestmír Pelant, whose family previously owned a farmhouse no. 17. Čestmír himself farmed on the farm since 1945, when the so-called national guests left the place - in this case the Germans from Bessarabia, to whom the Pelants had to leave the farm during the war. In 1948, the Pelants were charged a high land tax, which they were unable to pay; a year later, the farm was taken over by a local unified agricultural cooperative. The Pelants continued to live in the residential area, Květa found a job in the cooperative. However, Čestmír was fired from there, so he commuted to work to the national company TOS Mělník. The couple watched their former property falling into ruins, and their two daughters did not know until they were adults that the farm on which they grew up had originally belonged to their family. After the revolution, the Pelants received financial compensation and shares in the construction company for their collectivized assets, but their value fell sharply in the following years. Květa Pelantová lived on the farm until she was old.