Josef Skokanitsch

“How many of you were Croats in Radkov?” “Well, it was not what they stated that a maximum of five families lived in one village. There were much more of us there. It was not only Croats from Frélichov, but also from Nový Přerov. The folks from Dobré pole went to Melč, a neighboring village, where we went to a municipal school. I don’t remember what they were called, it was probably the Lavičkovi and Vranešicovi families, and some more families. I can’t remember what they were called, they soon died. Well, in Radkov, there were many of us, but when I moved back to Frélichov, then after a while my parents moved there as well and so I lost contact. When I was little, I remembered Radkov, each house in the village. Also, there were Germans, and they were moved out like us from here. And those few that stayed were natives. Then it was us, the Croats, and also some fifteen or sixteen families from Přerov. Eventually, it died out. When I was a kid, some died quite young. And now I guess, just like when we moved here and here were these ten, twelve families, so that’s the way it is there. They’re all jumbled up, some died, or it’s maybe just one of the family remaining, or just the kids stayed. Some even don’t speak Croatian. Some are ashamed to speak Croatian and speak Czech.”

“When people came back here, those old Croats, they had to have a pass. Jevišovka was brand-marked for extinction. We came back and we were the first ones who privately built a new house. We started to build in 1973. We didn’t want to buy a house from someone and our original house where I was born was not free. So what were we supposed to do? You can’t simply expel someone from a house when they already have it, so we waited until something would become available, a construction site. So finally we built a plot in our old street. An old house where we lived and we were building a new one. We didn’t want to buy somebody’s house, even if it belonged to somebody from the family, relatives, or a stranger, as he could then say: ‘why did you buy our house? Why ours? What if we go back?’ But I knew that nobody would go back.”

“My dad borrowed from a car, a Škoda Oktávia, from a friend and my uncle Šalamun was walking down the road with his cows. And there was so much mud that the car almost got stuck in it. So I told my mom: ‘mom, I’m not going back to Frélichov, it’s terrible here’. Cause I spent my childhood there. I didn’t want to go back, but now I wouldn’t change a thing. I spent twenty-two years of my childhood there, since I was two years old, so when you begin to be aware of your surroundings a little bit, there’s that going through childhood friends. You feel the most attracted to this time of your life and the palce where you spent your childhood.”