Anna Vojtková

“I met my husband by chance at the wedding of our neighbour. When I was getting ready to go home, he asked me to give him my address. And I retorted, come on, you won’t even remember me, and I’ve got a terribly long Croatian name. And he said: ‘My mum’s Croatian as well.’ My mother asked him what her name was. Mokrušová, he said. And where was she from? Nový Přerov. So Mum told me to run home and bring that wedding photo. So I brought it, and Mum showed it to him and said: ‘This is your mum, this is your granny.’ So he stared at that, then he went home and told what had happened. We started going out together, and half a year later our mums met again. They hadn’t seen each other since the deportation, the Mokrušes had been one of the first to be evicted, in 1946. It was such a touching reunion... And Auntie Jago, who lived in Domašov, told me: ‘I’m so glad you two found each other.’ I’ll never forget how she said that. It was so nice.”

“We grew up with Mum and Granny, and we always spoke Croatian at home. When I went to school, I didn’t even know how to say some things in Czech. Mum had a difficult time in the place she came to. The people who lived there, gold diggers, they didn’t know who’d come there, what kind of people. They thought they were gypsies because they didn’t even have ID cards, they’d been confiscated. My mum was brave, and very proud. And she told us a lot about Přerov, so we grew up as if we had been there.”