Three families were displaced. We were supposed to be the fourth
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Jaroslav Vaníček was born on 1 March 1938 in Bystřec at the foothills of Orlické hory. His father Josef Vaníček (1897–1974) and his mother Marie, née Vávrová (1902–1970), ran a farm of sixteen hectares, which had been owned by their family from the 17th century. Jaroslav had five siblings: Marie (1921–1992), Josef (1923–2006), František (1932–2010), Ladislav (1934–2016) and Václav, who was born in 1944. In the last days of the war, the family was hiding three fugitive British soldiers in a barn. In the 1950s, the family was affected by the violent collectivization of agriculture. In 1953, the three largest farmers and their entire families were evicted from the village. The Vaníček family was supposed to be fourth. His father Josef was imprisoned twice as he failed to deliver required volume of agriculture production. In late 1950s, his father eventually joined the Unified Agriculture Cooperative (JZD). After elementary school, Jaroslav attended a one-year agricultural vocational school. In 1957, he enlisted in the military service for the Technical Auxiliary Battalions, where he worked in the Ostrava mines as an enemy of the regime. After returning from the military service, he worked at the Unified Agriculture Cooperative in Bystřec as a mechanizer. In 1962, he married Marie, née Kyllarová, and together they raised four children. After the fall of the totalitarian regime in 1989, the Vaníček family began to farm privately again after forty years. In 2021, Jaroslav lived with his wife in Bystřec.
