Tomáš Czernin

“Only after it, I think that it was the same year when grandpa died, in 1984, I spent a week in Styria with Karel Schwarzenberg. I told him that I would stay here [in Austria] one day. And he almost scolded me. He said: 'What would you do here? We all are unhappy that we can´t be at home and we believe that we will come back one day. Your parents have decided that you will live there [in Czechoslovakia], so simply believe that the situation will change one day. You will be ahead of all of us who will return. Because we will have to get used to it again.' Something actually changed in my head. I suddenly realized that my granddad kept losing something his whole life. He was born in 1904, during the time of the Kaiser. And then the 20th century was terribly tragic. As a young man, grandfather experienced the land reform which really affected great-grandfather. He (great-grandfather) died when he was only sixty and grandfather had to take over the so-called large farm when he was quite young, he was twenty-six years old. At that time, the events of 1938 and the Munich crisis occurred. Grandfather was a member of the delegation of old Czech houses to president Beneš where they demonstrated for the preservation of the territorial integrity of the Czech Crown lands and against the secession of the Sudetenland. Then in spring 1939 they came to see president Hácha to express their sense of belonging to the Czech nation. Of course, participants of these declarations made it to the Gestapo blacklist. Grandfather was then imprisoned for listening to foreign radio, Radio London. He did not get the property back after the war. Then the communist putsch took place and then grandfather stayed in Austria in 1964. He lost the property and the homeland. He lived without money in Austria, he lived out of his relative´s support. He then gradually lost his health and suffered because of the separated family, because we stayed in Czechoslovakia. His life was sad. I realized it and took it into my head that I wanted to experience the contrary. I believed that we would return to Dymokury one day. When I was studying and someone asked me where I were from, I used to say that I was studying in Prague, living in Krušné hory but belonging to Dymokury. Although we had nothing there but graves. When the year 1989 and restitution took place I felt great satisfaction. All my dreams came true. I could return here and continue something that my grandfather had to abandon.”