Josef Stanko

"They insisted that as a soldier, I had to be a member of the Party. And so when I was in Military Academy, they drafted me to the Party, I undersigned my application there." - "You hadn't done it because you were an enthusiastic communist?" - "No, not at all." - "But you wanted to stay in the army." - "Well, of course, otherway, I wouldn't have been there." - "The army was a political army." - "In principle, all of the officers were communists. Party members." - "Why did you want to serve in the army?" - "I'm telling you I filed my application to the training and I was happy for being accepted; also for leaving the environment that I lived in as a boy and as a teenager. It was a dirty environment, it really was unfortunate."

"Eventually, I had to replace my father at work myself. I was twelve or thirteen years old. My father had fallen ill with bone tuberculosis. When he got a prosthetic on his arm, he couldn't do much with it and so I, as a twelve-year-old, had to replace him. It was around harvest time, and so I gathered grain for my father. He would prepare the horses and the cart but then he handed them to me and I drove to the field to collect the grain and bring it to to threshing machine. This is how things were throughout harvest time." - "That must've been hard." - "Yes it was. As a twelve-year-old, I had to lift and load the sheaves, and to align them, that wasn't easy. Then to transport them to the threshing machine... I had to do my best to get it done. And not only that. After harvest, I had to plough the field, replacing my father. The worst part was loading the plough on a cart and transporting it towards the field where I had to unload it again, assemble it and plough with it. It weighed around forty kilos and I had a hard time just loading it."