Josef Skokanitsch

“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.”

“And you learned Czech only by the time you went to school?” “Well, yeah I learned it. But my brother could not learn Croatian. Even though they initially spoke Croatian to him and even my grandmother, when she was still alive, spoke to him. They talked but he didn’t answer. So they were afraid that he’d speak at all, and began to talk Czech to him, as they lived in the Czech environment anyway, and he then began to speak Czech, but he never learned Croatian, yet. He understood Croatian, but said everything in Czech. Even at such a young age, perhaps he was embarrassed or I don’t know why. We spoke Croatian at home. My parents and my grandmother still could speak Czech and German well.”