Ivo Zapletal

* 1934  †︎ 2014

  • "In the third school year, in the fall of 1952, the principal invited me to his office and he told me: 'We got an order of the KNV that you are to be dismissed from school because your parents are enemies of the regime and you have to prove yourself somewhere in the work process. Then you can study further. If you want a certificate that you have completed two years at our school, we'll write it for you'. My disappointment was so great that when I then walked home to Krčmaň after getting off the train in Grygov, I sat down on a rock, looked around on the vast fields and I said: 'Our little fields, if you only knew what's coming your way!' I remember it as if it was today. At home, I announced it to my parents and my father said, 'I've been expecting it. What can you do anyway'."

  • "Somewhere at home I could find the conviction of my father for his failure to meet the deliveries of milk or wheat. But you couldn't meet them. My mother - in the worst times back then - would go eleven kilometers to Olomouc to sell some butter or eggs. She was breeding her own chicken and partridges to earn at least some cash."

  • "We lived right by the church. When the front arrived, the first wave of the retreating soldiers came from the direction of Přerov. They were Hungarians and I don't know what other nationalities they were. On the eighth, on Tuesday, at three o'clock in the afternoon, the Russians came to us to Krčmaň. They drove us out of the house because we lived right by the church and we had to hide at our neighbors, in their potato cellar. There was a window there, plugged by bags with a straw. The Germans were shooting at the troops coming from Olomouc and the tower of the church served as an observation point for the Russian artillery. So the Germans were shooting directly at the tower. Four grenades hit and destroyed our barn and two grenades were left half-buried in the garden between the barn and residential houses."

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    Jeseník, 05.05.2014

    (audio)
    duration: 02:45:25
    media recorded in project Stories of 20th Century
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Our little fields, if you only knew what’s coming your way!

Ivo Zapletal on a farm in Vlčicích
Ivo Zapletal on a farm in Vlčicích
photo: archiv pamětníka

Ivo Zapletal was born on May 27, 1934, in a small village called Krčmaň, situated between Olomouc and Přerov, where his parents owned a medium-sized farmstead. With his native village there is associated the so-called “Krčmaň affair” - the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate three non-communist ministers of the postwar government. The uncle of the witness, Ladislav Loveček, in 1947 was the first one to point to the fact that the trail of the assassins leads to Krčmaň, for which he was sentenced to six years of imprisonment after the seizure of power by the Communist regime. During the period of the collectivization of the farms, the Communists pushed hard the family of Ivo Zapletal to join the collective farm and because they steadfastly refused, they had to hand in very high supplies of agricultural products. For the failure to meet the exorbitantly high supply quotas, Ivo’s father was repeatedly fined and eventually he had no other choice than to join the collective farm. Before he could join, in October 1952, Ivo Zapletal together with other children of the so-called “Kulaks” were dismissed from the agricultural school in Olomouc and sent to work at a state farm in Javorník - the Vlčice farm. Here he spent a year of his life as a so-called “Green baron”. After leaving Vlčice he returned to his wife in Žulová, where he worked for a couple of years at a local state farm. Later, when he was employed he remotely graduated from an agricultural school. He still lives in Žulová today.