Jan Udržal

* 1928  †︎ 2011

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The district committee of the Communist Party labelled us as “kulaks”, so we were evicted from our family farm in Roveň

Jan Udržal as a student, 1947
Jan Udržal as a student, 1947
photo: Witness's archive

Jan Udržal was born in Dolní Roveň near Pardubice on 30 April 1928 into a farmer family that had worked in the region for generations and was one of the well-known families in the area. In April 1938, the then Czechoslovak Prime Minister Milan Hodža came to pay tribute to his late uncle Senator František Udržal. In the latter 1940s, Jan Udržal went to Prague to study at an agricultural school. He worked at the Young Cooperative Workers’ Department of the Central Union of Cooperatives. Thanks to this, he was placed with the apparatus of the Youth Union headquarters after the Union was closed and was in charge of the agenda of youth farms established in the borderland. He was unable to take the final exam at the agricultural school due to his participation in student protests at Prague Castle in February 1948. After returning home, he served in the army in Dašice where he and his comrades rescued a substantial part of the unit library intended to be destroyed. The family was bullied by the regime by disproportionately increasing the compulsory agricultural supplies and was labelled “kulaks” by the district committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. The parents had to move out of the family farm and Roveň. The father quit farming and found a job in industry. After returning from the military, Jan Udržal worked at the farming machinery station in Vysoké Mýto. Despite being one of the best educated employees, he was dismissed from the station as “politically unreliable”. He changed several jobs, but his interest in agriculture persisted. At the end of the 1960s, he graduated from the agricultural institute in Chrudim with a diploma in agronomy. In 1968, he unsuccessfully tried to establish an independent farmers’ union with his colleagues. In 1969, his mother successfully petitioned the presidential office for a permission to return to Dolní Roveň. In the 1990s, the family tried to resume private farming, but the tradition that had been violently interrupted could not be continued. Among other things, this was due to obstructions in restitution and a lack of funds to restore the dilapidated property. Jan Udržal died on 10 January 2011.