People didn’t trust each other after 1948
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Jiřina Žerebná, née Říská, was born on 22 April 1931 in Kocelovice, a village near the South Bohemian town of Blatná. Her father owned a small farm with three hectares of fields in Kocelovice, which supported his large family of five children. Jiřina had a difficult childhood, together with her siblings she helped her parents from an early age and immediately after finishing primary school she started working. In Kocelovice she lived through the war, its end and the beginnings of collectivisation in the 1950s. She witnessed how the difficult times of the war brought the villagers together and how the collectivisation in the fifties irreversibly disrupted relations between people. Thanks to the location of Kocelovice - the demarcation line passed through the village at the end of the war - Jiřina came into contact with American and Soviet soldiers, but also with the Vlasov soldiers of the Russian Liberation Army. At the beginning of the 1950s, her parents were the only ones in the village who refused to join the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD). Jiřina married in 1951 and moved to Blatná, where she still lived at the time of the interview (2021).
