Jiří Štěpánovský

* 1961

  • “Dad came back after military service. He continued to farm under pretty tough conditions, because he had to fulfil quotas, he had to fulfil compulsory deliveries, compulsory supplies from the farm to the state, and those were pretty cruel, meaning they often didn’t even have anything left to feed their own cattle, and this situation lasted until 1957, when the collectivisation was forced and they had to join the cooperative.”

  • “If I take my father’s imprisonment, it was also connected to a denunciation by the agronomist of the cooperative at the time that [my father] refused to put the horses to work on a drenched field when he saw it was pointless. So there were these clashes of opinion, but the Party functionary always had the advantage, and when someone stood up to such a person, they always ended up in court and on trial. You couldn’t just speak out about things back then.”

  • “I know this from my granddad’s telling: ‘I came to the field, there were two or three gentlemen standing there in coats, and they said they were confiscating the place.’ Granddad said: ‘I pulled out my whip from the cart, to threaten them. He put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a pistol, and there was nothing I could do but to submit to them.’ They took the cattle, the horses, the machinery, nothing was left.”

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    Byšice, 28.04.2016

    (audio)
    duration: 01:17:16
    media recorded in project The Stories of Our Neigbours
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You couldn’t just speak out about things back then

Father
Father
photo: archiv pamětníka

Jiří Štěpánovský was born on 28 March 1961 into a farming family. His grandfather had married in to Byšice after World War I, and their farm was the location of many historic events in subsequent years. During World War II it was used as accommodation by German and then by Soviet soldiers. The family held on to the farm until 1957, when they were forced to give up their property into collective ownership. They continued to tend to the farm, but they came into conflict with the management of the local agricultural cooperative over practical matters, and Jiří’s father was imprisoned twice as a consequence of these quarrels. Jiří Štěpánovský continued in his family’s footsteps, he attended a secondary school of agriculture and got a job at the local cooperative. First as a mechaniser and then as a zootechnician. After 1989 he received half of the estate back in restitution as inheritance from his grandfather, and he and his father decided to to revive the family tradition. In 1992 they took up independent operation of the farm. With the help of his whole family, Jiří Štěpánovský successfully tends to 40 hectares of land and numerous livestock to this day.