Tekla Pletichová

"Here we ended up with my grandmother in the Czech Republic, safe. I shoved it all away. Because I did not think about it, I did not remember, because a new life was waiting for me. I had to learn again, not relearn Czech, I never spoke much Czech, but we understood because my mother spoke Czech. However, simply the Czech language was a big handicap, but within a quarter of a year I was able to master the Czech language well and basically I would say that the trauma, such a really big one, caused me at the beginning of my stay here in the Czech Republic in that I was black-eyed, small, village - or Litoměřice is not a small village, but a small town where there were no foreigners. And in those four years, when I only spoke Greek, they threw me in the same bag as the gypsies and were very nasty to me. After a quarter of a year I came home, my mother spoke Greek and I refused to understand. She talked and talked and I was completely like mute, which was weird for her. I refused to speak Greek, so she had to start speaking Czech to me because I refused Greek. I really do not remember what happened, so actually, strangely enough, I survived the tumult of the war completely fine. No trauma because that mom was protecting us. However, I walked around that city alone; we went to school and so on. And since then I've had a bit of a problem with it, it's stupid, but when someone says: 'Black-eyed, Jesus, that's a Roma' - they called a gypsy - I have a bit of a problem with that, it really bothers me that they put me in a box, that they were mean to me. So those are the contrasts from my childhood."