Josef Regen

“I used to have guests when there was some trade fair in Brno. Once I had a guest from Beograd, some engineer. I told him that I was a Croat and we began talking in Croatian immediately. My children and wife went to sleep and we were sitting in the kitchen and talking till the morning hours. He was curious what words we used for this and that... and then he tells me: ´And how do you say train and train stop?´ I said: ´Oh, I don’t know this word in Croatian. We used to call it heitschtele, but it comes from German.´ He was laughing and he said: ´Well you don’t know it, because when the Croats came here, there were no trains yet!”

“When Hitler came, I was attending a German school. The Germans were all happy, Heim ins Reich. All back to the Reich and home... There was so much rejoicing when the Germans came... Later, when they had to join the army and they were at war and several of them were killed, in each house they had one or two men who died, they were cursing it and they didn’t like it. And then they had to leave...”

“Uncle Slunský owned a pub. One day he went to visit Frélichov. When they were displaced, he was forced to leave his horses there. And he met a Czech man, who had taken his property, walking with these horses on the road. Uncle saw his horses, approached them, touched their necks, and he became insane because of that. He was not normal anymore. When he saw his horses, he lost his sane mind. He loved them that much... it was very sad.”

“We were on the kiritof (traditional feast) and my sister and I wanted to go to see the place where we were born. But the woman didn’t let us enter. She shouted at us over the gate: ´Leave or I will call the police!´ We went away, she didn’t let us in. People are perhaps afraid that we would like to come back. But not anymore. Nobody would return anymore.”

“They were Germans, but they were actually not like Germans at all. A German would marry a Croatian woman and live there. For instance, in some families the father was German, but the mother was a Croat. There were many mixed marriages. If somebody married and began living in Frélichov, he had to learn Croatian. Even if he spoke only little and poorly, he had to learn, there was no other way. There were no purely German families, either a German woman married a Croat, or the other way round. When Hitler came, some Germans joined the party and claimed they were true Germans, these people then became different than us. Later we as Croats were blamed that we had become Germanized, but it was not so. There were mixed marriages, a guy was German and when Hitler came, he joined the party and he turned into a German, although in the Republic era he didn’t claim his German origin at all. They had been living there with us and everybody learnt to speak Croatian.”

“We would walk around the village, rattling with clappers. During Easter. Early in the morning, even at four a.m. or so, we children had to gather in front of the church and then we were running over the village and shouting: ´Rattle, rattle, three o’clock!´ or whatever time it was. When there was a mass, then it was ´ Rattle, rattle with one!´, ringing one bell. And if it was before the mass, we would say two bells. Children were running all over the village, rattling, and when they met in front of the church, they were calling: ´Rattle, rattle with two!´, and the mass began right after that. We liked it a lot. When the rattling was over, we would go for the eggs. We would call: ´Many children, few eggs!´ all over again. We would be going from one house to another and people would be giving us eggs. Eggs, not money. The eldest altar boy would then count the eggs and each of us would get several of them. I remember that when I was little, I got six eggs, let’s say. When I was older, I would get even nine eggs. Everybody had eggs at home, but we would go to sell them and then buy bonbons for the money.”

“Croatian song is a beautiful song. Croatian song is beautiful. Born as Croats, we will die as Croats. We sang this song when the Czechs, communists, were displacing us. We were still singing it, in pubs, everywhere… singing that we were Croats and that we would remain Croats. They didn’t like it at all.”

“They beat the mayor, uncle Šalamoun, and arrested him. There were more people who got arrested. My uncle Sič escaped to Rajhrad, which was in the Protectorate territory and the Germans couldn’t get hold of him so easily there.”

“We couldn’t speak German, we only had to start learning when the Germans came. For one year we were going to school without receiving any grades, studying only German. Only the year after we began getting grades. In our place there were only Croats, a few Germans and some Czechs. When I was playing outside with children, I learnt some German words, but I couldn’t speak the language. That’s why I remember that in school we weren’t getting grades in German for one.”

“In March, there was the sparrows’ wedding, we also celebrated that. I think this custom fell on March 21. When we were little, mother would always wake us up in the morning and call: ´Come look here, sparrows had a wedding!´ There was a tree in the yard, and our parents decorated this tree with ribbons, red and blue, they prepared a bottle of lemonade and some sweets there, as if it had been left from a sparrows’ wedding. We would wake up in the morning and be happy that we got the sweets. Today’s children don’t know this custom anymore.”

“The young people do not adopt their Croatian origin, not even my children. They cannot speak Croatian anymore. My wife is Slovak, and that’s why I haven’t even spoken Croatian to my children. My parents do, because the children understand everything, but they don’t speak, only a few words. I am afraid that in ten or twenty years nobody will be able to speak our Croatian. We old people will die and the young ones don’t know it. It’s really a pity, but what can we do when it happened this way? When we became able to go to Jevišovka after 1989, our representatives, Mrs. Hermina Opluštilová, born Slunská, promised that some families would be able to return to Frélichov, that the state would allegedly build houses for them and our language would be preserved. But nothing came out of it, nobody wanted to give the money for it. Now we go to Frélichov every year for the feast, I always look forward to it very much, but there are less and less of us.”

“When the Russians came, men immediately rolled out barrels from the cellars and began offering wine to them. The Russians then began chasing girls and women, they also raped some of them. Not so much in our village, because we were able to talk to them, but it was very tough for the German women from Drnholec. We could speak Russian. It’s a similar language and if you know Croatian and Czech, you can learn it quickly.”

“It’s gone. We have become used to this place. But we old people still think back. That’s why I go to Frélichov to visit about once a month. To see the village. I like to walk and look. I reminisce about the old times. I’m quite emotional and when I come for the kiritof (feast), I even cry a bit. We Croats do cry when all of us gather together. Now we are only awaiting death. I am looking forward to going to see Frélichov one more time, and then there will be the end.”

“Jews in Frélichov? Yes, there was Abeles. He had a general store. He was a good man. Nobody ever complained about him. If somebody didn’t have money, he would sell him on credit and let him pay later. He was a good man with a good family, they never did any harm to anybody. When the Germans came, he disappeared. They took them away, I don’t know where he went. There was this Jew.”