Anna Stará

“It was a ramshackle house, it was beams and on top of that used to be a granary before, so there was scrap from the mice falling into your mouth. They should have gotten fully compensated as they didn’t have a so-called ‘konfiskát’. Those who had this konfiskát were not even allowed to get anything back in the restitution. But they were supposed to be fully compensated. But it was a house in ruins ... one of the walls fell into the bedroom. There was a cowshed and it was all wet and dropped into their bed. It was riddled by the rats... There the rats also robbed our Christmas tree. And in Vlasatice it was all the same. They were also supposed to be fully repaid but didn’t get. When my dad was looking at some other houses, the told him: ‘Well, you're old. Here are twelve hectares of fields, you can not get it. You wouldn’t be able to manage it’.”

“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.”