Klára Vacková

“During the forced relocation, there was no call to go and loot the people’s property, but they went to the Czech lands and arrived back with full bags. I received one night gown from it. I have never made a decision for or against the relocation, and if I had been able to decide I wouldn’t have done it – I would never have been able to decide. I would have probably sought some other solution. The situation after the war was very tense, there was the injustice that had been done by Germans to Czechs, but I think that this was not a good solution, since innocent people were forced to leave as well. There are so many picturesque villages out there and I think of all these houses with their people, who may have spent their youth there, and now these people live somewhere else and they think about their old houses here, and strangers living in them now. All over the Sudetenland only very few people live in their native houses – instead, almost everybody lives in a house taken after somebody who had been forcibly driven out of there.”

“When my mom married my father, he served as a priest in a village in Carpathian Ruthenia, its name was Kosťová Pasteľ. Uzhhorod is located right behind the border. That’s the place where the novel Nikolai Schuhaj, Highwayman takes place. So my dad was a priest in this village of Kosťová Pasteľ, and my mom worked as a teacher there. When we visited the place with my husband, he exclaimed: ´Christ Jesus, you’ve grown up here, my girl´ Kosťová Pasteľ was a little village, there were many wolves roaming around, and they are still there. People were making traps for wolves, and wolves’ bones would remain in these traps. That’s why it’s called Kosťová Pasteľ (“kost” meaning “bone” - transl.’s note). You cannot imagine the poverty the people had to live in. Those who owned a piece of land had something to subsist upon. They were growing corn and potatoes, these were the staple food. A cow was the most important family member. Even more important than children. When a cow died or something happened to it, then the family had no fat, no milk, nothing that they could trade.”

“One doesn’t know where one belongs. When my identity card expired and I went to the police station to renew it, I was told that I was actually a foreigner because I had been born in Uzhhorod, and that for this reason they were not able to issue my identity card right away, but the application would have to go through the foreigners’ register in Brno. For quite a long time I had to carry some other document with me. When they issued my new ID card, they assigned a Slovak nationality to me. They told me it would cost fifty Crowns to have it changed to Czech, and so I told them to leave it. I feel as a Czech, but when I am in Hungary, I feel to be a Hungarian. I think that almost everybody is an immigrant here. I know only very few people who are real natives of Ústí. Whenever I ask somebody where they come from, they name some other place. The younger people don’t care about it anymore, but I do. Our grandchildren don’t, on the other hand. They were born here, and they feel to be at home here, although I also feel at home here. We moved here in the school year of 1950-1951.”

“In 1945/1946 somebody told my mom that the Russians would close the border. My mother was the organizer in the family, and she somehow arranged it all. She requested to be transferred to a place called Ruský Hrabovec, which lies in the easternmost tip of the Czechoslovak Republic. We moved there. They closed the border just one or two days after we had moved. In school we were taught in Rusyn, but that was not our native tongue. Each village spoke their specific dialects. Thus you could tell who comes from which village just by that person’s speech. The language spoken by the people in Ruský Hrabovec was quite similar. But we could not understand the Russians at all.”

“In the 1950s the Soviets came up with the idea to infiltrate the Greek Orthodox faith to Slovakia. And since my father was a priest and his brother was a priest and their father was a Catholic, it was the only meaning of life for him. The persuasion began in 1951. They arrived to us by car. My family didn’t explain it to me, but I sensed that something was happening. Some gentlemen in suits arrived to us in the evening, they brought drinks, and they spent the entire night with daddy; it looked as if they were merry, but I could see the tension in the family. This happened several times, they tried to make my father to sign a proclamation that he would convert to the Greek Orthodox Church, so that the Catholic Church would die out. My father would not have survived something like this. He was sitting with them, drinking with them, feasting and laughing, but he didn’t sign it. Then they lost their patience and one day they arrived and took my father with them. They took him away and we didn’t know where he was.”