“I was learning too, I was reading and heard Czech spoken at home. And they were visiting Bohemia. They spoke Czech at home all the time, when daddy and granny were there. (Just Czech really?) They only spoke Czech. As I was small, I think just a year or two, maybe less, they brought a small basket with cherries. I like cherries very much until today. I sat next to it and kept eating and eating and they said in Czech: ´Hide those cherries now.´”
“First we were [in Czechoslovakia – author´s note] in 1967. (Back then, you were twelve, right?) It was nice there, we liked it a lot. (And what have you done or where were you?) My parents were on holidays, they went to Hradečné and we were there a long time before that, a month and a half. They were visiting their family as they were all young. Daddy had many cousins there. Granny´s brother lived with his family in Brantice. So we went to visit them.”
„Huculi they were. In 1947 Huculi came here. When the Czechs left. (They were kind of Slovaks or Ukrainians?) Yeah they were Slovaks. (From Slovakia?) Indeed, from Slovakia. They came here and settled in the Czech houses. As the Czechs moved out, they gave them the houses. They simply lived in there. (And they didn’t stay, did they?) Some did and others didn’t. As they thought they were cheated on. They were promised to get land and be well off. But they were not. So they moved away.”
Jelena Jarmoljuková, née Podhájská, was born on 5 March, 1955 in Zdolbuniv in Rivne region in Soviet Ukraine. She comes from a mixed Czech-Belorussian marriage, her father was a Czech from Volhynia, who could not re-emigrate in 1947 due to illness and her mother comes from Southern Belorussia. Until the age of seven the witness grew up in Hlinsko, in a former Czech village and then moved to Zdolbuniv. She studied a pedagogic school and worked as a math teacher all her life in Zdolbuniv. She is an active member of a compatriotic association Stromovka, has relatives in the Czech republic and visited the native country of her father many times. Currently she still lives in Zdolbuniv in Ukraine.
