Anatol said - You won’t have farmers here either. In five years they were forced to leave the farm
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Jiří Růžička was born on July 26, 1929 into a family of farmers. His father Václav came from a house in Kluk u Poděbrad and rented a large farm estate in Slivenec, which later became a part of Prague. His mother was from Křečhoř u Kolína. They met after the First World War, in which his father was wounded. Jiří Růžička had a brother who was five years older and a sister who was a year older. During the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Germany on March 15, 1939, he experienced how the occupiers distributed their national dish ‘eintopf’ to the Czech people from large cauldrons. The large estate belonged to a Jewish owner, who ended up in a concentration camp, but survived. However, his wife and two sons died. After the liberation of the republic by the Soviet Union in May 1945, a military politruk stayed with the Růžičkas and told witness´s father that there were no farmers and bourgeois in the Soviet Union and that they would not be in Czechoslovakia either. In 1945, the manor farm estate came under national administration, and the Růžičkas continued to rent it. After the communist coup in 1948, the Růžičkas continued to farm the estate, but they were not allowed to have any employees. After the nationalization of the estate in the fall of 1949, Václav Růžička and his son became employees, they were fired at the end of 1950. Jiří Růžička enlisted in the army at the beginning of the 1950s and, as the politically unreliable son of a kulak, served for three years with the Auxiliary Engineering Corps in the Svatá Dobrotivá labor camp. After a year of returning from the military service, he found it difficult to find work, despite his high school diploma, he made a living as a manual worker and was persecuted by the communist regime. After 1989, he worked as a director of the Center for Folk Art Production.
