“The first TV set – I was maybe seven or eight years old – was to be seen at the Czech House. No, wait, even before that, Uncle Franta Kasiru had one in the pub. Then, when I was fourteen or fifteen we built the Czech House. Both houses – the Serbian House and the Czech House – were built at the same time. The entire village built the Serbian House next to the school, but only Czechs built the Czech House. Czech bricklayers, children and everyone would help; I remember we would stash, load and carry bricks, the boys would cart mortar in wheelbarrows and dig – we did everything.”
“I know my mum used to tell us that there were a lot of Russians in Kruščica, and there were Germans too. They would always hide in Uncle Franta Kasiru’s shop and pub. It was like this: when the guerrillas were up in the shop, the Germans were down in the cellar (the pub), and vice versa. The thing is, Uncle Franta Kasiru would hide both sides but kept them separated so they would not kill each other; they didn’t know about each other.”
“I was a good student but my dad told me: ‘If you have money, go on studying.’ And that was that. I finished the eighth grade and left school, one year earlier in fact. I had to go to the farming combine. That’s the way it was back then, and most people from Kruščica worked in vineyards. Back when I was still in school, at twelve years old, my mum would take me to the vineyard on holidays. We [children] could not carry heavy loads but we could pick and cut grapes and put them in boxes, and mum would take them to the road; or we could carry empty boxes.”
Things were better in the past
Margita Sloupová was born in Kruščica in the then Yugoslavia (Serbia today) on 11 May 1955. The community near Romanian border was home to a Czech minority. Although she was a good student her parents did not allow her to continue her education after her eight grade. She married a man in the Ablián settlement of Češko Selo (Czech Village) near the town of Bela Crkva in the east of Serbia. She makes her living farming to this day and lives in Češko Selo.
