Anna Stará

“It was terrible there, what am I supposed to tell you. There was all that snow and everything. We were totally unaccustomed to such a climate in southern Moravia. In the morning when we got up we couldn’t open the door, there was so much snow there.”

“I don’t speak Croatian anymore. I didn’t teach the kids Croatian either. Because I knew it wasn’t pure, so where could they make use of such a language?” “But we were fifteen times in Yugoslavia, where we made ourselves understood.” “No, we didn’t understand them.” “Dobro došli! Dobar dan!”

“Our Michal fell in Italy in World War II. He was born in 1924 so he was twenty years old when he was taken to the army. He fell just before the end of the war. Even we didn’t know what had happened to him. A fellow soldier of his from Drnholec came to tell us about it after the war. He was in the war with him so he knew he was dead and thus he came to tell his parents, but our poor old mother still thought that he would return. So we didn’t do a requiem in the church. In these funerals, there was the coffin and a photo. But we didn’t do it as my mom still thought that he would return one day. Only that soldier from Drnholce said that he was dead. My mother was born here, she had a brother, he fled across the border and lived in Austria. He searched for Michal through the Red Cross and found out that he had died in the war. We even got to know the number of his grave in Italy. Then Mařa went there to look for him.”

“I went for six years to a German school in Drnholec and then the next three years I went to a Czech school here in Frélichov. Back then they still did this JUK, as it was called. It was a one-year course where they taught us Czech. So we went to school for nine years, not for eight. Eight years is how long it takes normally, elementary school. And as we were so disadvantaged because we didn’t speak Czech, we had to study one more year this JUK.”