Magdalena Reichmannová

“Well, you know, when we moved there, my dad got a new cart. There was a Tischlar, also a Slunský, someone from the family, and my dad had that cart made by him. And then we had to leave. And he said, ‘I will not let the cart there, I’ll take it with me’. So he told me how he got here to Mackovice. The name of that director was Kutchan and he had vineyards in Miroslav. He was the director at the Hrusovany estate. The Croats were in Jevišovka and I don’t know how my father came to do that, but he found a couple of guys and they got to his vineyards and harvested the grapes. And then there was the deportation and my dad said that he’d not go there. Because our people had to move all the way to the north to take the houses left behind by the Germans. But my dad said: ‘I won’t go. I’m being expelled from my own house, driven to the north to occupy someone else’s house? I’ll rather go to the estate’. But nobody wanted to go to work on the estate because you didn’t get a replacement if you did. We left, but we didn’t get any replacement. My dad had to buy that house for himself. Well, Kuthan said to my dad: ‘Tomša, would you like to work on my estate?’ And my dad said: ‘Why not, I was never afraid of work. I served in Austria’. ‘Well, in Mackovice, there is one house, it’s wrecked but one room might be fixed, but otherwise, there’s not many other places to live there’. Because the houses there had already been taken, since 1945. There it was all German, too. And so my dad said that if there is one good room where we can live, he’d go there. So he went to see the house and stayed there in May, we moved in with my mom in August and I went to school in September. It was in 1950. We had one room and nothing more. But my dad begged the director if he couldn’t find him something better. So he took the cart, plows, harrows, he took it all. But otherwise, we didn’t get anything for the house, cows, furniture, nothing. All of this remained there. We just had a rather old table and that he allowed us to take with us. And two chairs. My mom also took some sacred images. The policeman looked on, but didn’t say anything. We were supposed to go to Huzová. However, the director arranged for my father to be allowed to stay in Mackovice. Well, so we were here in Mackovice and gradually everybody else was leaving. Uncle Matěj had to go to Skřipov, uncle Ferbár to Skřipov too, aunt Honimonova, my mother’s sister, had to go to Huzová, my dad’s sister was in Jívová. And gradually, as they were all leaving and leaving behind empty houses, my dad tried to get his family over. Well, that was it. So then we had uncle Ferbár coming over, aunt Solomon was here as well, there was aunt Sičová too, uncle Antonín was there, everyone here in Mackovice, but it was all my dad’s family. Aunt Růža was here as well...”

“Well, it was not a nice time, not even a little bit. It was terrible, nobody can imagine it. Those people, it was really desperate, when they had to leave everything behind there. When they left to Huzová they didn’t even know where they were going. Usually they moved them in the autumn and in the north, where they were going, there was already snow. It was terrible, really terrible, I hate to remember it. There was always so much crying and wailing, these people had lived there for so long and now they had to leave. Those who used to live in the north are now living around Břeclav, they moved there a lot. Nowadays their kids live there. Well, we’d have problems. Our mother had all her papers stacked and she would go back even without a house. She kept hoping to go back one day, believing it would happen. Eventually she died in 1985, my grandpa stayed alone. But if she was still alive, we’d really have problems with them, they wouldn’t have stayed here. Our mom never felt at home here. Although then there was the family here, but we also didn’t have an easy life here. They called us Germans. But we were not Germans, we were Croats.”

“I remember that my mother never ate the first cherries in May, she would eat them, but never the first ones. I sometimes asked about it. All the Croats were religious. My mother said: ‘you know, when those children die and they go to heaven, those children whose moms eat the cherries here on earth, St. Peter comes to them and says: ‘you won’t get any cherries, your mom already ate them for you’. Everybody there, not just my mom, they all kept that rule. That you can eat cherries, but only when there’s a lot of them on the cherry tree, but not the first ones.”