Štefánia Chmelarová

"My sister gave birth, left me at home, didn't send me to school because the pain had already come on her. So she says to me, 'Look, you're not going to school, you have to stay at home,' because my brother-in-law was at work, 'you have to stay at home with me,' and then she says to me, 'You're going to get my midwife.' She gave birth at home, she didn't give birth in the hospital, she gave birth at home. And I couldn't get out of the house because there were these Greeks, on the floor, sitting, girls, you don't want to see that. I was crying, I was scared of them because they were all in black clothes, we weren't used to that, black clothes. And as a child, I saw everything just in black, they even had headscarves in black. And now even in the Jeseníky Mountains it's cold, it's always colder there than it is here or like it is in the south, it was always there and the winds were there. And they, the poor people, had rags wrapped around their legs before they were accommodated, then they were accommodated. The post office was there, they put them in the school, the post office was there, and what little shops were there, so they put it all away, and the Greeks then, like, it was a big tenement building, one story, they occupied it all, they put them in there, they put them in the school, well, and then they stayed, like, after they got it all set up. They bought them deck chairs, they bought them everything, then they moved around the villages. Then it wasn't just in Bernartice, then they were in Buková, that was the name of the village, they were in Javorník, they were in Jeseník, they were in Žulová, they were divided like that, like the Ukrainians now, like the Ukrainians now, it's the same thing."